Virgin Machine
Filmmaking on the Queer Frontier

West Germany / 1988 / 84'
In German, English with Chinese and English subtitles

Director: Monika Treut
Cast: Ina Blum, Marcelo Uriona, Gad Klein

Dorothee Müller, a naive young Hamburg journalist, has grown tired of her pushy lover Heinz. She shares an unfulfillable longing with her gay half-brother Bruno. In all innocence, she embarks on an investigation into romantic love — is it a disease that only afflicts women? From a pleasure-seeking hormone researcher's office to the chimpanzee enclosure at the zoo, her search yields no satisfying answers. So she leaves the old world behind, trading grey Hamburg for sunny San Francisco. Shot in striking black-and-white, Monika Treut's 1988 underground classic is a joyful, quietly radical journey into desire that remains as fresh and provocative as ever.