A story of faith and disbelief. Of uprootedness and affiliation. What makes a boy from art school decide to leave home and live as a girl on the streets of Berlin selling her body for money? For more than ten years, photographer and filmmaker J. Jackie Baier followed transsexual Julia K. from her birthplace, Klaipeda in Lithuania, to her tough life on the streets as a hooker, outlaw and nonconformist who never signed any social contract.
"Julia is missing again. Yesterday I visited her in the porn cinema, in where she has crashed for the last six months. We sat in the common room of the hookers, which doubled as Julia´s bedroom; a smoky, dingy basement without any daylight, roughly the size of a prison cell, with a couch, a counter, a coffee machine and a TV, out of which some cheap television series blared at full volume. This room was what her life was limited to. She only left it when Mamsell called her for a client. I´d seen her for the very first time while she still worked at a bar in Wilmersdorf. For some time we both worked there, tempting clients with booze, offers of sex, whatever would bring in money. I soon left the business, though. The madam was simply not convinced that I was a good hooker and actually she was right - even though I learned a lot by watching Julia. Julia was soon to be out as well. She didn´t really get along in that joint. The madam had some kind of style, while Julia just had her style. It just couldn´t work. Afterwards they said that Julia was always drunk, but that can´t have been the reason, since if she had always been drunk, it probably would have worked out with the boss, who was chronically drunk herself, after all. About a year later I met Julia again. I was riding on a bus to Schöneberg, and she was at the corner of Froben-and Bülow - hustling at the strip. We drank a couple of beers at Bianca´s kiosk and she asked at some point if I wouldn´t mind taking some pictures of her again. I didn´t have my proper camera on me, just my mobile. I took some shots and once I left, promised to return. When I went back two nights later, this time with my camera, Julia had vanished. At the kiosk they said that she was dead, probably frozen to death somewhere. But then she reappeared." [J. Jackie Baier, 2006]
J. Jackie Baier (b. 1955 in Kiel, Germany) received an MA in Literature at the University of Essen in 1982. She worked as assistant director on films by, among others, Peter von Zahn, Michael Lentz, and Adolf Winkelmann, and made several documentaries. In 1983 she made her feature directorial debut with Die Mission - Film vom Frieden und seinem Krieg (which premiered at the Berlinale (Forum). From 1985 to 1988 she wrote and directed two television movies for ZDF, Die Splitter der Eisbombe and Frühstück für Feinde. She has directed TV series since 1995. She had a sex change in 1997; Johanna Jackie Baier was officially a woman. She started to experiment extensively with photography and has exhibited her work at national and international art fairs. In 2006, she presented a selection of photographs and a short film as part of the group show SEX WORK (Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin). In 2011 Baier´s feature-length documentary House of Shame premiered at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival.
2013 Julia (doc)
2011 House of Shame: Chantal All Night Long (doc)
1988 Frühstück Für Feinde
1984/85 Die Splitter Der Eisbombe
1983 Die Mission - Film vom Frieden und seinem Krieg
