The 16-minute documentary, released on YouTube yesterday (May 13), takes the viewer into the recording of his acclaimed 2025 album Blurring Time as he received testosterone injections.
Bells Larsen has found the right time to tell his story, this time on film.
Armed with a 1999 JVC VHS-C camcorder, the Canadian singer-songwriter chronicles his life undergoing testosterone injections while recording and launching his acclaimed 2025 sophomore album, Blurring Time (Royal Mountain).
The result is Bells Larsen: Blurring Time (the documentary), which has been released online today. The documentary, directed and filmed by Larsen himself, charts the transgender artist’s life from 2022 to 2025, delving into his process and his transition, as he was creating his album, which was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2025.
There have been several showings of Blurring Time around Canada before its public release. Billboard Canada attended the screening on May 2 at the Rio Theatre in Vancouver and spoke to Larsen about his experience making the documentary and the album.
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“There’s so much of my music in the film, but the film is a lot of me talking about me,” he says. “It's very candid. I’m not hiding behind metaphor, I’m not hiding behind poetry, and I’m not hiding behind my guitar.”
The 16-minute film compiles footage of his experience making Blurring Time, while Larsen has a series of earnest and revealing conversations with the camera about who he was, who he is, and who he has grown into.
Larsen is all about honesty, in his music and as he talks about his story. He is not only focused on the transformation of himself physically and of his voice as his central instrument, but also on the lessons he learned about his self-worth along the way.
We have now just passed the first anniversary of “Visa-gate.” This is the expression Larsen uses to describe the story that made him and his music go viral in April 2025. He was forced to cancel six tour dates in the United States after the release of his album because of a new visa policy implemented by Donald Trump in which U.S. Immigration would only recognize legal ID that matched sex assigned at birth. "To put it super plainly, because I’m trans (and have an M on my passport), I can’t tour in the States," Larsen said at the time.
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While he planned on releasing the film Blurring Time much earlier, that experience and the public attention that came with it forced him to change his plans. It wasn’t the right time.
The film opens with a disclaimer that it contains scenes of injections. The three years of footage, twelve hours in all, was compiled and condensed by Larsen and boy wonder (Ryan Faist). The scenes feel like visual diary entries, and are mostly shot with Larsen in the centre of the frame. The majority of the film, in fact, is made up of clips of testosterone injections: by friends, by a medical professional, but mostly by and with himself, all while he waits — impatiently, admittedly — for his body and his voice to change.
“I think [the music in Blurring Time] is a bit more introspective and poetic [than my previous music]. I think a lot of that is because I was writing it during lockdown,” Larsen says. “I felt like the world was under a microscope, and then when I was writing Blurring Time it felt like I was under a microscope.”
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The changes to his voice and his body with testosterone were unavoidable. Though Larsen welcomes this, he explained in the Q&A after the Vancouver screening that it filled him with a great deal of anxiety. He had to wait and see if his plan for a duet with his pre-testosterone voice — what he had banked on for his sophomore album — would pan out as he imagined.
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“I think that there was just a lot more intention with the second record again, because I had to do the math with regards to my timeline, when my voice would drop and when I would start testosterone. But also, I tried to have a lot more intention behind the songwriting itself.”
It was a risk, but he embraced it as he fell into the unknown. He recorded the album with the help of long-time friend and fellow musician Georgia Harmer, who assisted in the curation of melodies and production. Larsen describes Harmer as his “musical dramaturge." Together, they embraced a style that was self-consciously confessional and unvarnished.
“I really like the idea that my music has the same quality as a voice memo,” he says. “I want my listener to feel like they are right next to me as I am playing the song for the first time in full.”
His self-confidence and artistry as a musician were, as he discovered, one and the same. He couldn’t capture one without the other, and neither was honest without first accepting himself.
It helped shape his process for his new album, which he’s set to start recording with his label, Royal Mountain Records, later this year. It will be a slightly different sound, he says, focusing on raw acoustic arrangement and alternate tunings. But it will have the same intimate quality.
Larsen is happy with the kindness viewers have shown for the film so far. Following every screening, viewers have come up to him to share what Blurring Time means to them, and how it's permitted them to be themselves and embrace change.
“To me, this was the whole point in making both the album and the documentary,” he says.
