aemi & Gaze LGBTQIA+ International Film Festival Present: A Body To Live In + SKINFLICKER
This screening will be followed by a conversation with filmmakers Helena Gouveia Monteiro and Angelo Madsen Minax
Irish Film Institute, Sunday 3rd August @ 14:30
SKINFLICKER
Helena Gouveia Monteiro/ Ireland/ 2025/ 5m
As a digital editing technique arbitrarily shuffles Super8 footage of skin, accompanied by the animal hide percussion of the bodhrán, SKINFLICKER reinterprets the flicker film form to explore the representation of a body through surface and fragmentation.
A BODY TO LIVE IN
Angelo Madsen (FKA Madsen Minax) / U.S.A./2024/97 minutes
A Body To Live In is a feature film that traces the life and work of legendary photographer, performer, and “Gender Flex” cultural icon, Fakir Musafar (1930-2018). Through investigating the body modification movement and the trajectory of Fakir’s art career and philosophy, A BODY TO LIVE IN uncovers a riveting facet of queer history. Using Fakir’s early experiments in body play and his photographic works from the 1940s and 50s as a springboard, the film traces the body modification movement as it emerged in LGBT subculture in the early 1970s.
The film introduces us to early collaborative experimentation at gay unground BDSM parties, leading to the first piercing shop, moving through the radical faerie movement and the role of body modification during the AIDS epidemic, the emergence of body-based performance art, and the rise of an entire subculture. Insights from key figures including Annie Sprinkle, Ron Athey, Cléo Dubois, Jim Ward, Midori, and others provoke deeper reflections about art making, surviving AIDS, and the controversial collaging of various spiritual and cultural practices to build a philosophy.
Captured in static 16mm film portraits, A BODY TO LIVE IN unfolds conversationally between Fakir’s archive of 100+ hours of unseen footage, and the voices of the canonical elders of this movement, to create intergenerational dialog, question cultural responsibility, and provoke larger ideas about the drive to transcend the limits of the body.
Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax or Angelo Madsen Minax 2005-2024) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire. Madsen‘s works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tribeca, De La Warr Pavilion, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, REDCAT, Museum of Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and dozens of documentary, LGBT, and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a Creative Capital Fellow (2025), a United States Artists Fellow (2023), a Guggenheim Fellow (2022). His film, “North By Current” (2021), aired on PBS, was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, “North By Current” has been called “A beautiful, complex wonder of a film,” by Rolling Stone and “A titanic work” by Criterion. Madsen is currently releasing A Body To Live in (2025), about the world of body modification as documented through the lens of photographer and performance artist Fakir Musafar. Madsen is an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont.
Helena Gouveia Monteiro is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker from Portugal, living in Ireland.Concerned with the history of technical images and influenced by experimental cinema and media archaeology, she creates films, books, and multi-media installations that engage different levels of visual and cultural recognition to question our perception of language and audio-visual experiences, with a particular focus on the materiality and sensory possibilities of film.
Her work has been shown internationally in both gallery and cinema spaces, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Indie Lisboa, Curtas Vila do Conde, Glasgow Shorts, Public Art Fund/The Filmmakers Coop (US), and Festival Ecrã (Brasil). “Purkyně’s Dusk” (2021) is distributed by Light Cone Paris and “Man of Aral” (2023) was supported by the film project award from the Arts Council of Ireland.
She is the co-founder of Stereo Editions, an independent publishing collective of artists’ editions and a member of L’Abominable/Navire Argo. As a researcher and educator, she has facilitated workshops and curated film programs in Ireland and abroad, for the Hugh Lane Gallery, IMMA, Photo Museum, and Dissolutions Festival.
