Many young people find right-wing politics ‘cool’ today and marginal people caught between different digital bubbles find a new obstacle to being themselves. Making a film was a way to look into the personal and political story of someone changing their gender identity. It was a ‘cinema therapy’ for Monika and had a deep impact on everyone involved.
Graham Douglas
Paul Poet is an Austrian filmmaker who is interested in the psychology of the extreme-right and the impact of trauma on personal identity.
As Paul says: “People with poor self-esteem and weak identities are looking for a powerful figure and its recent increase is also a phenomenon of the digital age, which was amplified by Covid. Instead of friendships or human exchange, where ideas are discussed and negotiated, many people now live in functional bubbles where everyone is either with you or against you, and anyone who might be an enemy is cut off and eliminated from view. Trump as a person is not a real strong guy but people long for the leader as a fantasy figure”.
Poet’s previous films include “My talk with Florence” (2015) about a woman traumatized growing up in a commune, which he talked to The Prisma about, and “Auslander Raus!” (2002), a satire of racism and anti-migrant prejudice. His filmmaking draws on psychology and the role of dreams as he works to enter the mind of conflicted people. His latest film “Soldier Monika” tells the true story with Monika’s help, of a woman who passed as a man in the Austrian army for years and changed the law on gender-recognition in Austria and Germany.
She was a heroine for the anti-Covid vax conspiracy theorists, but was erased by them in Stalinist fashion when she came out as Trans.
For The Prisma, I talked with Paul and Sarah Zaharanski, one of the lead actresses, after the film was shown at Doclisboa.
How did you meet Monika, did you already have the idea of the film?
She met me! I had a reputation as someone who talks to all sorts of marginal people, the so called “freaks” and “crazies”, tags that are used to silence people most of the time.
I am known as someone to trust in a media world filled to the brink with liars. To a degree it was like that with Monika too and since young people in Austria who wanted to rebel, and had followed left-wing subcultures for decades, my home too, were suddenly finding the extreme right more ‘sexy’ and ‘cool’; something was happening, and I wanted to make a film that entered into the soul of it. I was then doing some work for the investigative journalist platform Addendum and meeting Identitarians, these very posh neo-Nazi types involved in fashion magazines who knew how to handle the media. Very shallow people who just wanted to be famous.
I also made some short documentaries for the Austrian private TV channel PULS4 each about a different conspiracy theory, and I was recommended to contact Monika as one of the conspiracy experts concerning the ‘truth’ of 9/11.
She wasn’t very out at that time.
She was in the mainstream papers like Kronen Zeitung which I don’t normally read. I was filming at a high-rise block of flats near Vienna when suddenly this huge woman built like a Schwarzenegger-size Valkyrie, with high heels, long red fingernails and hair down to her waist appeared with this big papier-maché model of the World Trade Centre, and sweetly says “Hello Paul”. We were near a green area a dog toilet, and she sits down there with this papier- maché twin towers in the middle of all the dog shit and makes Matchbox planes fly into them. I couldn’t believe my eyes. All my John Waters dreams had suddenly become true.
Later I found out that Monika is famous in the LGBTQ+ community because through a court case she got a law in Austria and Germany overturned that said people could not change gender without sex-change surgery. She wasn’t recognized for this milestone change, because she had been a right-wing hooligan as a teenager. In the film she meets “Bademantel”, a guy she had known then who went on to be involved in the neo-Nazi Küssel Army in the 1990s and got jailed for it, and he tells Monika, that if she hadn’t started her military career then, she would have been with the neo-Nazis.
Monika wrote a book about her coming out that was picked up by the mainstream media, and a comedy film screenplay about it was written that was supposed to be directed by Peter Kern, a famous gay man, a friend of mine who was attracted to right-wing people. She gave me the screenplay to take over, after Peter had died, but I wanted to do something different, and she was: “Ok, cool”. I really wanted to understand her mind, because although she’s known in right-wing circles, she also has connections with Queer left-wing people and voted Green most of her life. She’s a living crossroads, a symbol of the frenzied times we live in, where identities are torn apart, people exist in different bubbles and randomly move between them.
I had the feeling that Monika doesn’t want to resolve her inner conflicts, she tries to belong politically, but she can’t accept the categories people want to put on her, because ‘they’ are trying to take away her creativity as a human being, like I think Nietzsche said.
Sarah: We looked into her life a lot and I read her book, but there were moments when what she said just didn’t make sense – and I’m ok with contradiction.
I played her first wife, Freya who she was with for 8 years including her gender transition. They met in London, when Monika was still Toni, a soldier and drill instructor with the militant group Centurio, so Freya fell in love with a man who gradually became a trans woman. I couldn’t speak to her in person, but Monika said Freya saw it as fun at the beginning but later she got scared. And when I asked Monika about it, I always knew that she was biased.
It’s as if there were always four people’s views present – there’s what Paul said, then what Monika said about it. I also spoke to other people who had been in a relationship with a partner who transitioned, who said it was like you fell in love with someone who no longer wants to be the person you loved, and that person gradually disappeared. The fourth viewpoint was my own gut feeling.
When Paul directs, he gives the characters a lot of freedom to improvise: no rehearsals, just talking in depth for weeks and being together. We only had one chance, because Monika went into all those reenactments of her own life with all her personal history and wounds. It had been a hard time for her too, losing the person she loved and becoming someone new, and it takes a lot of courage as a non-professional actor to play yourself going through a difficult transition.
Was there any conflict about what the film would show of Monika’s life?
Paul: We had a 40-page script, but Monika never looked at it. I would tell her on the day roughly what we were going to do in the scenes, and I got together this group of actors who were like the avatars of her family to play those people and thus enable Monika to reflect on her life story, reliving all those crucial moments as a now 50+-year old person.
You had the actors discussing with each other about the roles they were going to play in Monika’s life story. What was your psychological approach?
I was influenced by my experiences of therapy which helped me out of an almost suicidal depression. and by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cinema, which uses psychological magical games and rituals to go into the soul of the person. It is about extending the filmmaking process into a very real therapeutic method using acting and re-enacting as a way of finding yourself, going into the deepest depths of the soul where also Monika wants to find out more about herself. For decades since childhood, she used uniforms for this fantasy figure of herself as a sort of super-heroine to escape the dramas of growing up. The fantasy was formerly her armour but now her real identity is to live at this permanent crossroads. By working with me over 4 years she was able to understand herself better. But it has moved everyone involved, especially her mother.
*Next week: The Tiger in high heels: gender wars and political image-making.
(Photos provided by Freibeuter Filmproduktion and Paul Poet for free use to Theprisma.co.uk). Photo Courtesy: Filmstills and Poster: Paul Poet/Freibeuter Film. Filmstills shot by Simone Hart. Poster Design by Sonja Poet. Sarah Zaharanskis Portrait Foto: Credit Teresa Marenzi. Paul Poet Portrait Foto: Credit Sonja Poet. Hofer Fllmtage Snapshots: Julia Mitterlehner/Jumitdim and Sarah Zaharanski)
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