Country: Austria
Year: 2024
Duration: 106
The battlefield is gender identity. Monika Donner is a transsexual elite soldier, a poster figure for gender rights, and an author favored by the extreme right. Quickly she, who used to be a he, becomes a solitary warrior caught between the ideological fronts. The psychogram of an impossible person, realized as an intensive cinematic collage, using actors to travel even deeper into Monikas strange mind.
Biography
film director
Paul Poet
(South Arabia, 1971) was raised all over the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Since his puberty living in Vienna, he became a forming part of the local punk and electronica scene. He moved into film-making in 1996 after studying journalism and philosophy. In 2013 his debut cinema doc Foreigners Out! Schlingensiefs Container (2002) was selected by the Biennale Istanbul and then was honoured with special screenings at MoMA New York, Istanbul IFF, Doc Aviv. Other major Cinema works: Empire Me (2011) e My Talk with Florence (2015) (2015). He is also well known for his work as cinema curator for Filmarchiv Austria, Viennale IFF and Diagonale FF.
FILMOGRAFIA
Hoch Zeit (cm, doc, 1996), Triphopping in the Planet Drug (cm, doc, 1999), Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container (Foreigners Out! Schlingensiefs Container, doc, 2002), Empire Me - Der Staat bin ich! (Empire Me, doc, 2011), Follow the Sun (cm, doc, 2011), My Talk with Florence (doc, 2015), Church of Fear - Loops I-V (doc, 2020), Theatre the Hard Way: Schlingensief does Jelinek (cm, doc, 2021), Der Soldat Monika (Soldier Monika, doc, 2024).
Declaration
film director
“As a leftist activist, I planned for a long time to do a film about the European drift toward the extreme right and why this seemed legit and sexy to a lot of people I would have never dreamed of to find this relevant. The majority I investigated proved to be Nazi dorks and complete idiots though. With Monika Donner I found a singular person with more depth, soul, history and complexity, whom I could approach as a Transperson on friendly eyelevel terms, a person, with whom I could mirror the political shift on intimate personal terms, but also confront the general bigot and self-righteous moral shallowness of the 2020s.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR, SCREENPLAY: Paul Poet. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Simone Hart. EDITING: Oliver Neumann. MUSIC: Gewalt. CAST: Monika Donner, Jasmin Donner, Sarah Zaharanski, Maria Hofstätter, Mateja Meded, Philipp Hochmair, Roland Düringer, Michael Thomas, Sibylle Rauch, Neil Young. PRODUCTION: Sabine Moser, Oliver Neumann for Freibeuter Film.
CONTACT: Paul Poet PaulPoet@gmx.net
