This piece is based on a conversation between Chase Joynt, artist, and Hannah Dyer, academic, about Joynt’s short-film Akin (2012), which reflects on a mother and son’s shared history of violence. This encounter between artistic production and academic critique explores the psychic uses of film for representing and working through childhood trauma. Drawing from the fields of film studies and trans studies, the authors investigate what drives Joynt’s aesthetic impulse to represent a difficult experience and the intrapsychic conflicts that result from the imposition of violence in childhood. Together, they suggest that an ethical orientation to the unnamable, enigmatic, and insidious residues of sexual violence can be uniquely symbolized in film.