Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities (HKLGFF 2026)

Before the world had the vocabulary, San Francisco had the “gendernauts”. At the giddy height of the late-90s tech boom, Monika Treut embedded herself among the Bay Area’s community of trans and gender-fluid artists, activists and academics: historian Susan Stryker, “Goddess of Cyberspace” Sandy Stone, video artists Texas Tomboy and Jordy Jones, intersex activist Hida Viloria, and the irrepressible Annie Sprinkle. These voyagers were charting identities beyond the binary decades ahead of the culture, and Treut films them not as case studies but as pioneers: partying, working, skydiving, remaking their bodies and their world with wit and ferocious self-possession. Winner of the Teddy Award at the Berlinale, this landmark documentary now doubles as a time capsule of a freer, pre-gentrification San Francisco, and as proof that the future arrives first at the margins.