Opening with nature documentary footage of the female hyena, which physically and socially seems more like the male, Gendernauts, a scattershot documentary about the fringes of gender identity, looks a lot like any low-budget TV documentary. We are shown interviews with a clutch of "gendernauts"--transsexuals, hermaphrodites, sex artists and transvestites--who chat about their personal journeys, lifestyles and preferences. These people work mostly in a nebulous area somewhere between the sex industry and avant-garde art but director Monika Treut keeps coming back to the people themselves, who perhaps take themselves rather too seriously even for Americans but all have challenging, odd, interesting things to say. Among the cast of characters, mostly found in San Francisco or New York, with shuddered memories of early lives in small towns somewhere in between: female-to-male transsexual Max Valerio, women-who-choose-to-live-as-men Jordy Jones, Texas Tomboy and Stafford, pornographer/artist Annie Sprinkle, intersex person Hida Vilario (perhaps the wryest and most engaging of the lot), "goddess of cyberspace" Sandy Stone, Penthouse pin-up/transgender den-mother Tornado, cabaret performer Elvis Herselvis. Treut, whose earlier films (Seduction: The Cruel Woman, The Virgin Machine) have been more striking as cinema, damps down her own pictorial instincts to keep her subjects centre-screen. Even at 82 minutes, it gets repetitive and there's a sense that the film might have been stronger if it honed in on fewer people and got a little deeper--it's effectively a cheerleading film for the gendernauts, which means glossing over some of the hard times these people must have had living in a country a lot more prejudiced than this film is. --Rainbow Christen
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