dir. Monika Treut
2021 // 1 hr 28 mins // Digital Projection
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 been a utopia for trans communities has now grown largely inaccessible due to rising costs and gentrification. Sandy Stone, Stafford, Susan Stryker, Max Wolf Valerio, and Annie Sprinkle all return in this lovely—if bittersweet—document of trans elderhood and enduring activism in the face of an affordability crisis and a repressive government.
“[A] powerful and uplifting queer communion of intimate conversations … being witness to it feels like sitting in a quiet corner with all the most interesting guests at a party.” - The Queer Review
FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR: THE FILMS OF MONIKA TREUT
Ever since the release of her debut feature Seduction: The Cruel Woman (made in collaboration with filmmaker and longtime cinematographer Elfi Mikesch) in 1985, Hamburg-based filmmaker Monika Treut has devoted herself to depicting and documenting queer lives on screen, exploring the mysteries and ambiguities of gender, and transgressing repressive sexual mores and ideas. Fiercely controversial in her native Germany—where Die Zeit once proclaimed that “films like Monika Treut’s are destroying cinema”—Treut found much more acceptance for her work in the burgeoning queer film festival and independent film scenes in America, leading to several decadeslong collaborations with queer icons like trans poet Max Wolf Valerio and “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle.
FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR brings the core of the first half of Treut’s career together in the form of recent restorations by the Hamburg Kinemathek. Encompassing both narratives (Virgin Machine, My Father is Coming) and documentaries (Didn’t Do It for Love, Gendernauts), these seven films are fearless explorations of sex and gender that trace the more taboo and less-documented arcs of queer history of the late 20th century.