Monika Treut: Virgin Machine

Dorothee, a would-be writer and journalist, leaves Germany for the Oz of San Francisco, searching for her long-lost mother and a cure for the malady of love. Installed in the Tenderloin, she peeps in on neighbors' bizarre sex rituals as well as does sightseeing of the more traditional kind. If the film's sexual politics relate Treut to Fassbinder - It's like the Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant - without the angst and melodrama, the black and white look of the film harks to the velvet of Germany's glory days, the expressionist films of the 20s.