Status
Completed
Type
Cinereach-Supported Production
Year
2025
Production
Key Cast
Director
Angelo Madsen
Producers
Angelo Madsen, Lyle Ravi Kash
Angelo Madsen, Writer/Director/Editor (Previously known as Madsen Minax) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire. Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Moving Image, Leslie-Lohman Museum, De La Warr Pavilion, and dozens of documentary, LGBT, and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a Creative Capital Fellow (2025), a United States Artists Fellow (2023), a Guggenheim Fellow (2022), and has participated in residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Headlands, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others. His film, "North By Current" (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, "North By Current" has been called "A beautiful, complex wonder of a film," by Rolling Stone and "A titanic work" by Criterion. In 2024 the Video Data Bank acquired over 20 of Madsen’s videos to create a compilation of early works (2002-2008) called CHICAGO SEX CHANGE. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont. He lives between Burlington, VT and New York City.
Angelo Madsen, Writer/Director/Editor (Previously known as Madsen Minax) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire. Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Moving Image, Leslie-Lohman Museum, De La Warr Pavilion, and dozens of documentary, LGBT, and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a Creative Capital Fellow (2025), a United States Artists Fellow (2023), a Guggenheim Fellow (2022), and has participated in residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Headlands, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others. His film, "North By Current" (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, "North By Current" has been called "A beautiful, complex wonder of a film," by Rolling Stone and "A titanic work" by Criterion. In 2024 the Video Data Bank acquired over 20 of Madsen’s videos to create a compilation of early works (2002-2008) called CHICAGO SEX CHANGE. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont. He lives between Burlington, VT and New York City.
A BODY TO LIVE IN is a feature film that traces the life and work of legendary photographer, performer, and "Gender Flex" cultural icon, Fakir Musafar (1930-2018). Through investigating the body modification movement and the trajectory of Fakir’s art career and philosophy, A BODY TO LIVE IN uncovers a riveting facet of queer history. Using Fakir’s early experiments in body play and his photographic works from the 1940s and 50s as a springboard, the film traces the body modification movement as it emerged in LGBT subculture in the early 1970s. The film introduces us to early collaborative experimentation at gay underground BDSM parties, leading to the first piercing shop, moving through the radical faerie movement and the role of body modification during the AIDS epidemic, the emergence of body-based performance art, and the rise of an entire subculture. Insights from key figures including Annie Sprinkle, Ron Athey, Idexa Stern, Cléo Dubois, Jim Ward, Midori, and others provoke deeper reflections about art making, surviving AIDS, and the controversial collaging of various spiritual and cultural practices to build a philosophy. Captured in static 16mm film portraits, A BODY TO LIVE IN unfolds conversationally between Fakir’s archive of 100+ hours of unseen footage, and the voices of the canonical elders of this movement, to create intergenerational dialog, question cultural responsibility, and provoke larger ideas about the drive to transcend the limits of the body.
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