Sissyboy
Katie Turinski:
Sissyboy (USA, 2008)
English
Sissiboy is a wonderfully big and loud mess of glitter, booze and cynical drag queens. If you’ve seen Stephan Eliot’s The Adventures Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, you know what this is all about.
The documentary by the first-time filmmaker Katie Turinski charms with its energy and the jubilant appearance of the people in it. Sissiboy tells the story of twelve drag queens who consider their purpose in life to expose the ludicrous aspects of the society. To achieve this, they become these aspects. They call themselves gender terrorists, the “infamous transvestites your mother warned you about”. Under the surface you can find optimistic, brave and happy people who live their dream together with their friends.
Sissiboy was chosen to the programme of South by Southwest, a great honour for a debuting filmmaker. The documentary is warm, energetic and coarse. In the Rokumentti line-up the film brings the underground culture, introduced by The Cockettes, to the modern day. In her documentary, Katie Turinski shows the Sissyboy group’s final year of existence. The film is extraordinaly entertaining – when it doesn’t shock with nudity and gushy debauchery.
The energy of Sissiboy doesn’t leave the audience indifferent. The film is saucy, irritating and embarrassing, but also extremely lovable. Cheap and vulgar? Definitely yes, and very amusing, too.
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KATIE TURINSKI
Katie Turinski first fell in love with documentary filmmaking in high school, and when given the assignment of making a short film for her senior video class, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. Armed with a VHS camcorder and a list of questions, she proceeded to interview as many of her senior classmates as she could, taping their responses to things like “What is your most embarrassing moment. Ten years later, at 28, Turinski has continued to feed that passion and her first feature-length documentary “Sissyboy” is the fruit of two years of her labor.
