dir. Monika Treut
1991 // 1 hr 22 mins // Digital Projection
Vicky (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 father (Alfred Edel) hastily makes plans to visit her. As Vicky rushes to hide the aspects of her lifestyle that she doesn’t think he’ll approve of—namely, her gay roommate Ben (David Bronstein) and lesbian lover Lisa (Mary Lou Grailau)—only to become involved with a handsome stranger with a mysterious past (Michael Massee) in the process, Pops winds up tangled up with “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle.
A supremely kinky (yet surprisingly wholesome) sex comedy, My Father is Coming is also a loving tribute to the East Village and notable for being one of the first feature films to prominently feature a trans man character.
"A cheerful cornucopia of kinkiness where genders and sexual preferences aren't simply bent—they're twisted into corkscrews.” - The New York Times
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.