By Hook or by Crook, 25 Years Later

“I didn’t know if I was a total loser or just totally lost,” admits Shy (Silas Howard) at the beginning of 2001’s By Hook or by Crook, a trailblazing “trans and butch buddy film” that’s equally revolutionary for refusing to broach the subject of gender at all. Co-directed by real-life buddies Harry Dodge and Silas Howard (who also teamed up in 1992 to found the iconic San Francisco performance space Red Dora’s Bearded Lady), the micro-budget movie follows a couple of down-on-their-luck “freaky grifters” who refreshingly don’t even acknowledge, let alone comport with, hetero-cis society’s norms. The film centers on the transmasculine Shy, who, reeling from the death of his father, decides to leave his small town to pursue a criminal lifestyle in the big city. Once there, however, the low-key drifter gets caught up with Val (Dodge), a vibrantly eccentric bulldagger on a Sisyphean search for her birth mother. Unsurprisingly, drama soon ensues for this unlikely duo.

To read my interview with the director-screenwriter-actor-producers visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.

Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens: Ecosexuals

Since 2002, multimedia artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have been exploring love, sex, and queer ecologies through filmmaking, performance, art exhibitions, activism, a book (Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover), and even walking rituals. It’s an unusual œuvre for a rather unlikely duo. Stephens has been a professor and two-time chair of the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz for more than thirty years. Sprinkle comes from a much different world that’s given her a higher profile. Starting in the ’70s, she was a sex worker and porn star for more than two decades, as well as a feminist performance artist and “pleasure activist.” (She also holds a PhD in human sexuality and has been inducted into all four adult film Halls of Fame.) The co-creators’ latest film Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is billed as “a joyous ecosexual documentary born from the ashes of California’s devastating fires.” It’s an apt if brain-twisting description of this conclusion to Stephens and Sprinkle’s trilogy of queer environmental docs, beginning with 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (the first queer environmental feature documentary, according to Susan Stryker), which was followed by 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure.

To read my interview visit The Gay & Lesbian Review.

Playing With Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency — Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens [Review]

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency opens with a bright red “WARNING. This film contains environmental destruction, explicit ecosexuality and performance art.” It’s a playful start to a cinematic project prompted by a devastating event — a massive wildfire that ripped through Stephens and Sprinkle’s Boulder Creek community in Northern California. Though the pair, life partners and artistic soulmates for nearly a quarter century, returned to their refuge in the Redwood forest to find their home had been spared, not all their neighbors, plants and animals included, had been so fortunate. This in turn spurred the filmmakers to do what they’ve been doing since 2013’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (hailed as the first queer environmental doc) and on to 2019’s Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure: transform climate grief into radically joyful queer action.

To read the rest visit In Review Online.

A Conversation With Nicole Bazuin And Andrea Werhun (MODERN WHORE)

Modern Whore, which world-premiered at TIFF, is the latest sex-work-destigmatizing project in an unusual multiyear collaboration between director Nicole Bazuin and the hybrid doc’s co-writer and star Andrea Werhun (who also served as a consultant on EP Sean Baker’s Anora). It’s based on Werhun’s book Modern Whore: A Memoir, which features Bazuin’s photos, and comes on the heels of Bazuin’s 2020 shorts Modern Whore and Last Night at the Strip Club, which likewise center on Werhun. In other words, this prolific pair have long been on a fierce artistic mission to bring the oldest and perhaps most misunderstood profession in the world out of the closet, and simultaneously slay some tired tropes in an inventively stylish and often cheeky manner along the way. A few days after the film’s May 1st VOD release (via Quiver Distribution), Hammer to Nail caught up with the Canadian duo to learn all about the productive partnership, along with what they’ve dubbed the “Modern Whore Cinematic Universe.”

To read my interview visit Hammer to Nail.

"Her Work Expanded What Lesbian Representation Could Look Like on Screen”: Brydie O’Connor on her Sundance-debuting Barbara Forever

"It’s been my own life that I’ve put on the screen,” pioneering artist Barbara Hammer says in VO as we witness her striking poses, flexing muscles, and standing defiantly naked before her lens. “My life has been lived in film.” Indeed, the taboo-shattering lesbian/avant-garde filmmaker, who died of ovarian cancer at the age of 79 in 2019, left behind an archive comprised of 80 films, along with a treasure trove of unreleased footage, audio interviews, personal photos and more. It’s an extraordinary body of work, put to skilled cinematic use by Brydie O’Connor — who likewise collaborated with Hammer’s widow Florrie Burke for her acclaimed 2022 short Love, Barbara — in her Sundance-debuting feature Barbara Forever. Fusing Hammer’s poetic words and striking images with her own experimental editing approach, O’Connor takes us on a riveting ride through one woman’s boldly adventurous life and the larger frame of queer history, from the lesbian and gay rights movement of the ’70s through to today’s more inclusive and expanded awakening. Ultimately, Barbara Forever is a heartfelt portrait of an individual who wasn’t afraid to embrace life on her own terms, holding lessons for humans of every profession and persuasion. A few days before the film’s January 24th Park City premiere, Filmmaker caught up with O’Connor, an award-winning artist in her own right whose “work activates archives through queering storytelling structures within the nonfiction space.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

STRAY BODIES

Though Elina Psykou’s Son of Sofia took top honors in the International Narrative section back at Tribeca 2017, the acclaimed Greek director’s first documentary, last year’s unconventionally cinematic Stray Bodies, has yet to find distribution on these shores. Which is an inexplicable shame. Debuting at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2024 – where riot police were dispatched in response to far-right threats – the film next played CPH:DOX (where I saw it), before hopping the pond over to Hot Docs in Toronto. It was a notable festival journey for a doc about “involuntary body-related traveling” (as the CPH:DOX synopsis so spot-on stated) – specifically throughout Europe, but in the wake of a global crackdown on reproductive rights, a topic not far from anyone’s shores.

To read the rest of my review visit Hammer to Nail.

“Seduction: the Cruel Woman Was Banned for 18 Years”: Monika Treut on her Queer Trailblazing Career

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since I last interviewed queer film pioneer Monika Treut. At the time trans identity was just starting to become tentatively accepted. Fifty Shades of Grey (a story centered around two straight, white, privileged cisgender protagonists into BDSM) had been released earlier that year, and was well on its way to becoming a glitzy Hollywood franchise. In other words, marginalized subjects the German filmmaker had been deeply and cinematically exploring for over three decades — Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Verführung: Die grausame Frau) hit screens in 1985! — were just beginning to enter the mainstream consciousness. Which inevitably proved to be both a blessing and a curse. And that’s why it’s an honor to catch up once again with Treut, whose eclectic oeuvre also includes docs like 2001’s Warrior of Light, a portrait of the human rights activist Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, and 2012’s The Raw and the Cooked, a dive into Taiwan’s culinary traditions, just prior to the Anthology Film Archives run of “Female Misbehavior: The Films of Monika Treut” (October 11-19), a seven-film retrospective of the icon’s recently restored early works.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.