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 decades-long collaborations with queer icons such as trans poet Max Wolf Valerio and “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle. In recent decades, Treut’s field of interest has come to encompass the culture and people of Taiwan, where she’s made several films.

FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR presents the core of the first half of Treut’s career 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.

“Female Misbehavior” is guest-programmed by Elizabeth Purchell and Andrea Torres, and is co-presented by “The Cinema of Gender Transgression”, Anthology’s ongoing series which is organized in collaboration with Joey Carducci and Angelo Madsen.