Programmed March 2026

Sex, Gender, and Seduction: The Films of Monika Treut

Ever since her daring debut feature, the fearlessly transgressive S&M exploration Seduction: The Cruel Woman , Monika Treut has been at the forefront of queer cinema, illuminating LGBTQ+ lives with subversive wit, uncompromising honesty, and compassionate insight. Fiercely controversial in her native Germany—where the newspaper Die Zeit once proclaimed that “films like Monika Treut’s are destroying cinema”—Treut found wider acceptance in the burgeoning queer film-festival and American independent-cinema scenes, leading to decades-long collaborations with queer trailblazers like trans poet Max Wolf Valerio ( Max ) and “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle (Female Misbehavior). Spanning narrative ( Virgin Machine , My Father Is Coming ) and documentary ( Didn’t Do It for Love , Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities ) modes, these films are taboo-shattering, playfully intelligent explorations of sex and gender that defy repressive cultural norms to shed light on the often-hidden arcs of queer twentieth-century history.