Sheila McLaughlin

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Wanda is a dominatrix who runs a gallery in a building on the Hamburg waterfront, where audiences pay for the privilege of watching her humiliate her slaves. She is a business woman who smashes sexual stereo¬types and social taboos with icy self-possession and an enigmatic smile. As an artist, she specializes in the staging of elaborate S&M fantasies, while her affairs transgress the usual boundaries of personal and professional life. Along the way she leaves her German lesbian lover, a shoe fetishist, for an American “trainee,” and does more than step on the toes of the male performer who has broken the rules of the master-slave relationship by falling in love with her.Read More »

The film COMMITTED, which Sheila McLaughlin realized together with Lynne Tillman, is not a biography of actress Frances Farmer but rather a fictional analysis of the same. It deals with the disturbed relationship between Farmer and her mother, the sociopolitical climate in the USA of the 30s and 40s, the role of psychiatry as an increasingly powerful determinant in this period and the destructive love story between a woman (actress) and a man (director). COMMITTED is conducted as a Film noir and a period piece – the latter of which is unusual for an independent film.Read More »

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Agatha is an international lawyer, Jo a filmmaker. The two women are lovers. While Jo is on the road showing her films, Agatha discovers and reads her diaries. Problems ensue as Agatha’s transgressions lead to jealousy and a spiraling cycle of sexual obsession.

Sheila Dabney and Lois Weaver star in this landmark lesbian classic. Revelatory for its representation of a new lesbian desire, She Must Be Seeing Things put forth a politicized eroticism that mirrored the burgeoning butch/femme scene at the time. – First Run FeaturesRead More »