Documentarist. Queer-friendly co-director of the prizewinning dissident epic Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), U.S.-trained Achbar is familiar to the queer audience for his 2 Brides and a Scalpel (Vancouver, 1999, 55). This video diary recounts the Nanaimo-based loves and lives of MTF Georgina Scott and “lesbian bio-girl” Linda Fraser, who by the sequence of marriage first and surgery later became the first married lesbian couple in Canada. A hit of the 2000 international queer festival season, this work vindicates small-format digital video as a sensitive and astute chronicler of our lives, apt for both melodrama and comedy. Editor-facilitator Achbar skillfully integrated Scott’s and Fraser’s quotidian perspectives to offset his own outsider liabilities and ensure Brides’s place among transgender representations in Canada.