For those of us of a certain age, any large, blended family brings to mind television classic The Brady Bunch–but Nick and Katherine North are a very real family, whose award-winning, 20-minute documentary tells how they fell in love, became a blended family with five kids, and navigated Nick’s gender transition from female to male. Watch it free, in full, right here. It just might be the sweetest thing you’ll see on the Internet today.
Together, Nick, a branding strategist, and Katherine, a life coach, co-wrote, co-directed, and co-produced Just Another Beautiful Family, which won the Audience Choice Award at the Calgary International Film Festival last week. “Our goal is to show people an example of what a happy, loving family looks like with queer parents,” said Nick in a statement. “As cool as it is for us to win this award, I actually think it’s a sign of progress for all of us. Three years ago when I came out, I don’t know that a trans film would have been this loved and accepted. We wanted to show everyone that there are so many kinds of beautiful families.”
About Nick’s transition, Katherine said in the film, “I just had to trust that if it was the right thing for him that it had to be the right thing for our whole family; that as much as there might be challenges and there might be costs for everyone, that that was nothing compared to the cost of having someone betray his own truth.”
Although Nick and Katherine had worked with a therapist and had a plan in place for supporting the kids through Nick’s transition, their kids’ big question was, “Why did you wait so long?”
Nick explained in the film, “Unless like there’s a story attached to something that someone else is giving them, the kids don’t have this concept of it being right or being wrong…. It really wasn’t this life-altering thing because I was just the same person.”
I won’t spoil more of Nick and Katherine’s words, but I love what they say about the values they hope their kids will gain from their experience of Nick’s transition and their journey as a family. Here’s the 20-minute film in full so you can hear them yourselves: