Barbara Caspar: Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker ? (2008)

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A multi-layered work featuring animation, archival footage and interviews with the likes of William Burroughs, Carolee Schneemann and Richard Hell, Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker by Austrian artist Barbara Caspar and co-produced by Annette Pisacane (Nico Icon) and Markus Fischer, is a thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late outlaw writer and punk icon, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-’90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon.

Carlos Motta: Gender Talents (2013)

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GENDER TALENTS is a web-based project by artist Carlos Motta that engages movements and discourses for gender self-determination within trans and intersex communities internationally. It features an online archive of video portraits of trans and intersex activists who thoughtfully perform gender as a personal, social, and political opportunity rather than as a social condemnation. Based on in-depth interviews conducted in Colombia, Guatemala, India and the United States the portraits expose the ways that activists challenge the bio-cultural “foundations” of society and question gender norms from the perspective of sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and disability.

Fan Popo: Be a Woman (2011)

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Every night, the “Only Love” bar in Nanning puts on a glamorous transvestite show. This documentary follows the four drag queens over a span of three years to depict a touching and realistic perspective beyond flashy costumes, glamorous accessories, dazzling stage sets, and sensual dancing.

Giuseppe Campuzano: Museo Travesti de Perú (2009-2013)

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El Museo Travesti de Perú nace de la necesidad de una historia propia —una historia del Perú inédita—, ensayando una arqueología de los maquillajes y una filosofía de los cuerpos, para proponer una elaboración de metáforas más productiva que cualquier catalogación excluyente. Lo travesti se plantea entonces como subversión de la condición espuria que tanto el museo tradicional, como los presupuestos sociales, le endilgan. Al respecto, contextos históricos tan diferentes como el Perú prehispánico y el marco propuesto por Magnus Hirschfeld durante la República de Weimar, admiten todo un rango de posibilidades entre los extremos de lo masculino y lo femenino.

Jai Arun Ravine: Tom/Trans/Thai (2013)

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Tom / Trans / Thai is a short experimental film that approaches the silence around female-to-male (FTM) transgender identity in the Thai context by addressing tom and trans-masculine identities in Thai and Thai American communities and the transnational relationships between gender and language.

Interviews conducted with Thai and Thai American toms and trans-masculine people are channeled through the moving body in an effort to locate ourselves in the Thai landscape and create a new language for our kind of being.

Wu Tsang: Wildness (2012)

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Directed by Wu Tsang. Wildness is a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic, LGBT-friendly bar on the eastside of Los Angeles that has catered to the Latin immigrant community since 1963. With a magical-realist flourish – the bar itself becomes a character in the film – Wildness captures the creativity and conflict that ensue when a group of young, queer artists of colour (Wu Tsang, DJs NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom) organise a weekly performance art party, called Wildness, at the bar. What does ‘safe space’ mean, and who needs it? The search for answers to these questions creates coalitions across generations.

Luis F.Bernanza/Margaret Gilpin: Mariposas en el andamio (1996)

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by Luis Felipe Bernaza, Margaret Gilpin

After the Revolution, gays were not respected in Cuba, but in the small Havana neighborhood of La Güinera, a few courageous women came to power and encouraged the gay community. Glamorous gowns fashioned from grain sacks and eyelashes made out of carbon paper are the reality of drag in Cuba. In La Güinera, gay transvestite performers have earned respect and status through creative work for the neighbourhood. On stage action and backstage preparation opens out into insightful interviews with community leaders, families, and the performers themselves.

Sam Feder / Julie Hollar: Boy I am (2006)

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An important exploration of issues rarely touched upon by most films portraying female-to-male (FTM) transgender experiences, this feature-length documentary sets itself apart from other recent films on this topic. Tackling the resistance of some women in feminist and lesbian communities who view FTM transitioning as at best a “trend” or at worst an anti-feminist act that taps into male privilege, this groundbreaking film opens up a dialog between the lesbian, feminist, and transgender communities while also promoting understanding of transgender issues for general audiences.

Pêdra Costa: de_colon_isation (2017->)

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de_colon_isation is a live performance series to create a space of intimacy and political claim through the body, live images by a dildo camera and “The Southern Butthole Manifesto”. It uses post-porn as a strategy of pleasure, aesthetics and politics. Playing the artist as an exhibitionist, it shows performance art as a place to interact […]

Gabriel Baur: Venus Boyz (2002)

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A legendary Drag King Night in New York is the point of departure for an odyssey to transgendered worlds, where women become men – some for a night, others for their whole lives. What motivates them. What changestake place? What do they dream of? The drag kings of New York meet in clubs and change lustfully into their male alter egos, parodying them and exploring male eroticism and power strategies. In London we see women experiment with hormones to become new men and “cyborgs”. Masculinity and transformation as performance, subversion or existential necessity. An intimate film about people who create intermediate sexual identities.