So Pretty

Tonia, a German transgender visual artist, comes to New York City, where she meets Franz, an American academic working on a new exhibition on German author Ronald M. Schernikau. They talk politics, art, and love, go dancing, fuck, protest, and organize alongside their friends, Paul, Erika (a transwoman and musician), and Helmut (a transmasculine political radical). When Paul is injured in a political action, their social space is momentarily shattered.

Meanwhile, viewers will come to realize that their lives—and thus the film—are morphing into a version of Schernikau’s novella so schön, a communist-themed depiction of four lovers in 1980s Berlin, which is read aloud by the characters in voice-over and at the art installation. The film is also overlaid with music by Rachika S, who also plays Erika, and a host of female electronic musicians.

An investigation of leftist politics and identity in the context of an increasingly right-wing world, So Pretty moves freely between fiction and semidocumentary, adaptation and translation, the artistic and personal worlds its characters generate across time and culture serving as a space for new tensions and potentials.

“It will all work out, little mouse. It will be something totally different than we can imagine.” – Ronald M. Schernikau, so schön