Preceded by short: This Is Not Your Life (Jorge Furtado, Brazil, 1991). The director of this well-crafted short randomly picked an "average" South Brazilian housewife as his subject, to show that ordinary people, rather than being "statistics," have rich and interesting stories to tell. (20 mins, In English and Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 3/4" video, From First Run/Icarus) Dressing for success has its cross-gender incentives. In Ladyboys, two Thai boys, aged sixteen and seventeen, don feminine dress as a way out of rural poverty. But it's not quite that simple: these young katoi (transvestites) revel in their femininity as a sign of difference, of admission into the secrets of gender. Highly publicized drag beauty contests attract cross-dressers from throughout Thailand. For the successful, the pageants lead straight to the glitzy cabarets in the southern town of Pattaya. Ladyboys describes a complex world in which definitions of gender are inseparable from the economics of exploitation. Once esteemed figures in classical Thai dance, the katoi have now been reduced to workers in a pseudo-glamorous sex industry. This insightful documentary shows that clothes can make the man, or be his undoing.-Steve Seid