Following the therapeutic benefits from making the film, Monika discovers that the outside world is riddled with double standards, even within minority groups. Her constant search for acceptance in political groups is moderated and she achieves a clearer vision of the world and its shortcomings: “Better be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not”.
Graham Douglas
Taking part in making the film as herself was a challenging process, but it had a therapeutic effect that allowed Monika to have an open conversation with her mother and to relate to people she knew in right-wing groups without an inner need to feel loved by them.
Ideological purity proved a standard she refused to conform to. She was famous both in Queer circles and among right-wing anti-Covid Vax activists for her books. She is now over 50, yet her teenage history with hooligan groups proved dangerous when it was discovered at an LGBTQ+ centre where she used to give readings from her books. She was told not to return.
She had made serious social contributions in her fight to change the law on gender changes, but this was only appreciated by a minority on the Left; this time she was ‘too individualist’ politically to be accepted as authentic, and again the hooligan phase was resurrected.
And in the Army, proud of its newly minted openness to Gays and Trans people, when she declared herself Trans she was moved away from the ranks to a desk job.
So much hypocrisy coming from the unrecognized fear of difference, even among minority groups, shines a light on the pain suffered still after the personal changes she has gone through on her journey of self-acceptance.
Images are often preferred to dealing with reality and its contradictions
Did the filming change her view of herself?
We stopped filming for six months because some scenes triggered old trauma, like the quarrel with her mother and her first wife and leaving a heterosexual relationship in a nuclear family to be with a woman who was more gender-fluid. That was very painful, re-traumatising, but also cathartic to relive it in the filmmaking.
Sarah: We wanted to show the love between her and Freya, before the break-up, when they loved not just the gender but the person. As people we needed to feel into all these real and complicated relationships as human beings, apart from the needs of the filmmaking.
Sometimes I would go back to the hotel and just be crying, it was so demanding because Monika just is herself, but I had to relive it with her as Freya not Sarah.
Paul: the interesting thing was after this crisis Monika was screaming at everyone, saying she’d given all these actors some free group therapy and she’s now sorted; she doesn’t need any more of this. But months later when the film was finished, she told me it had taken her deeper into herself, and asked if we could continue with some filming sessions, because she needed more.
Your film was cinema therapy
Yes, completely. And she became more integrated as a person. She could be with the right-wing people without needing them to love her despite knowing they hate Trans people. The book she wrote “Covid dictatorship” was a best-seller, she was a star during the pandemic.
We made that cartoon necklace of faces in the film after I asked Monika who were all her idols, and they were so different and diverse, Trump, Stalin and Greta Thunberg, Hitler and Tina Turner. They are personal power fetishes, put together beyond all logic.
How did her story influence other Trans people?
She was very closely involved with the TransX centre for LGBTQ+ people at the Rosa Lila Villa in Vienna and she did several readings of her book about coming out there, but they got frightened by Monika’s hooligan background and told her not to come back: she didn’t present a stereotype Trans identity.
And in the army when she came out as changing her gender, she was transferred to a desk job, with no more contact with the other field soldiers. The army created this public image of accepting the first Trans person and gay marriage, but Monika was just a PR stunt for them, and she became very depressed.
She was thrown out of the army, because of her public resistance about Covid.
She is very well regarded on one side because TransX acknowledged her role in changing the law, but then she was just erased in a very Stalinist way by the websites.
She is still known in the Trans community, this is mirrored in the film dialogue she has with “the leftists” in the boat on the lake.
The two people in the boat are Natascha Strobl, the best-known leftist analyst of the extreme right-wing movement in Austria, and the other is Natalie Rettenbacher who is the trans rights speaker of the leftist party “Links”.
Natalie was well aware that Monika never got recognized for changing the law because she had been labelled a Nazi, and she wanted to show that she is really an empathic person.
She was ostracised by the Covid campaigners after they found out she was trans. But is there also a fantasy level where those people are turned on by someone like her, because she is also trans?
Sarah: She considers herself homosexual because she’s in a lesbian relationship now as a pre-op trans woman, and she said that now she has made the transition it’s not so important, she’s not concerned about getting the right label, unlike a lot of LGBTQ+ people. People in general want to know, but for her it’s of no importance anymore– there’s a scene in the film with her wife Jasmin where she talks with actor Philipp Hochmair, reliving the first drag transition. And Jasmin says for Monika, that we need to accept gender labelling for other people to use, but not so much for ourselves.
There’s a natural sympathy for Monika on the left, and yet she doesn’t seem to be drawn to them.
Paul – Her father died when she was still young, but he was a violent man a strong believer in right-wing ideology. The older she gets, the further she is from these parental figures, the stronger she longs to still be accepted by him and she’s expressing her loyalty to his thinking as a way to do that. Her attitude towards leftist people who reject her is “fuck you, I don’t need you”.
Her mother is still alive, and she encouraged her to be a strong woman because in the 1970s she was one of the first women to get a divorce in Austria when women still needed their husband’s signature to be allowed to get a job. Her mother was a real feminist heroine.
I put a lot of work into trying to understand the soul of the person more deeply. I used to phone Monika every day for an hour, for the whole four years and during the filming. She recorded a dream diary during that time: revealing her fetishes, her desires, her nightmares. I was inspired by her book “Tiger in high heels”, with different structures and episodes, to think about how they were narratable as a cartoon or a daydream sequence in the film, and also in a therapeutic sense.
In her book she describes a dream, which I re-wrote, and it was acted out in the film, at the same time showing how she reacted to it. The only other film I know that goes into the personality of people who superficially are seen as monsters and tries to explore their deeper mindset is “The act of killing”. Oppenheimer improvised and let that film develop a life of its own, that’s why an artist should never stick to prescribed rules.
Anything to add?
Paul: You mentioned Nietzsche, and although Monika didn’t know this before, her idolising of the child was a re-phrasing of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. In that book he says that human development goes through four stages. First there is the Lamb, the blind human being who passively accepts being moulded by social forces, then the Camel who actively implements them and endures, walking through the desert for hours and still surviving, then the Lion who fights for some social issue but is still defined by struggle, and finally after all these battles, you find your inner peace and become a child again, looking naively and without judgement at the interwoven cruelty and beauty of the world. And Monika is naively idolizing the child. Kubrick also used this as the star child in his film “2001”. So, this is really “Beyond good and evil”.
(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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