Dirty Looks

Purnell's audacious and hysterical hit novel, 100 Boyfriends, leaps off the page through a series of madcap “mixtape” films. Blending performance styles, film footage, dance videos and hardcore porn, Purnell blends his chaotically queer art practice with slices of life in the age of social media. What the fuck is a film? Expect live interruptions and only the unexpected.

German film enfant terrible Rosa von Praunheim trained his lens on the trans and gender-defying Americans who sought refuge in Berlin’s 80s club scene, catching some of the most honest and alarmingly prescient intergenerational dialogues about trans life ever dedicated to celluloid in the process.

Dirty Looks has dug deep into documents of trans history to assemble a program of archival trans portrait films that spool from experimental cinema of the 1970s, activist video, and personal portraiture. Spanning an early decade of production, illuminating (lost?) queer histories and liminal spaces across America, The Girl Can’t Help It screens poignant testimonials and early rhetorics of trans-femme ideation.