Directed by Monika Treut
8 Episodes
Ever since her daring debut feature, the fearlessly transgressive S&M exploration SEDUCTION: THE CRUEL WOMAN, Monika Treut has been at the forefront of queer cinema, illuminating LGBTQ+ lives with subversive wit, uncompromising honesty, and compassionate insight. Fiercely controversial in her native Germany—where the newspaper “Die Zeit” once proclaimed that “films like Monika Treut’s are destroying cinema”—Treut found wider acceptance in the burgeoning queer film-festival and American independent-cinema scenes, leading to decades-long collaborations with queer trailblazers like trans poet Max Wolf Valerio (MAX) and “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle (FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR). Spanning narrative (VIRGIN MACHINE, MY FATHER IS COMING) and documentary (DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE, GENDERNAUTS: A JOURNEY THROUGH SHIFTING IDENTITIES) modes, these films are taboo-shattering, playfully intelligent explorations of sex and gender that defy repressive cultural norms to shed light on the often-hidden arcs of queer twentieth-century history.
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1:28:18Episode 1Seduction: The Cruel Woman
Episode 1
Directed by Monika Treut and Elfi Mikesch • 1985 • West Germany
Starring Mechthild Großmann, Udo Kier, Sheila McLaughlinWanda (Mechthild Großmann) is a dominatrix who runs an S/M performance space in Hamburg where she stages elaborate sexual rituals for a discerning audience. Cruelty is her pro...
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1:26:09Episode 2Virgin Machine
Episode 2
Directed by Monika Treut • 1988 • West Germany
Starring Ina Blum, Gad Klein, Marcelo UrionaPart German-expressionist satire, part sapphic travelogue, Monika Treut’s fiercely controversial VIRGIN MACHINE follows Dorothee Müller (Ina Blum), a German journalist researching an article about the nat...
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1:21:38Episode 3My Father Is Coming
Episode 3
Directed by Monika Treut • 1991 • Germany
Starring Annie Sprinkle, Alfred Edel, Shelley KästnerVicky (Shelley Kästner) is a German expat working as a waitress in the East Village while also dreaming of making it as an actor. She’ll have to give the performance of a lifetime when her stodgy fath...
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1:21:57Episode 4Female Misbehavior
Episode 4
Directed by Monika Treut • 1992 • Germany, United States
Monika Treut presents four short documentaries about individuals who live and act outside of society’s expectations of womanhood. In DR. PAGLIA,“Sexual Personae” author Camille Paglia holds court with writer Bruce Henderson. Then, in ANNIE...
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1:20:29Episode 5Didn’t Do It for Love
Episode 5
Directed by Monika Treut • 1997 • Germany
Eva Norvind was born Eva Johanne Chegodaieva Sakonskaja in 1944, the daughter of a Russian prince and a Finnish sculptor in Trondheim, Norway. Monika Treut’s DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE traces the many stages of her unbelievable life story: her early success a...
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Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities
Episode 6
Directed by Monika Treut • 1999 • United States, Germany
Made at the height of the tech boom of the late 1990s, Monika Treut’s Teddy Award–winning GENDERNAUTS: A JOURNEY THROUGH SHIFTING IDENTITIES is a portrait of a group of trans artists, activists, and academics living in San Francisco—includ...
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1:31:33Episode 7Genderation
Episode 7
Directed by Monika Treut • 2021 • Germany
Twenty years after the making of her groundbreaking trans documentary GENDERNAUTS, Monika Treut returns to San Francisco to catch up with her subjects and find out where time and life have led them. What she finds is a city transformed: what had once bee...
