In her provocative US film debut, dyke feminist icon and Academy Award-winner Tilda Swinton is a revelation as a tightly armoured power dressed bi-sexual lawyer on the edge of professional breakthrough, personal breakdown and sexual awakening in this riveting and thought-provoking erotic psychological drama. Based on the 1991 feminist psychoanalytic text, ‘Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary’ by Louise J Kaplan, Female Perversions is an inspired amalgamation of erotic drama and psychological thriller, distinctly scored by the multi award-winning composer Debbie Wiseman, set within the cutthroat environs of the LA justice system.

Eve Stephans (Swinton) an ambitious and successful trial lawyer in Los Angeles, is up for appointment as a judge while juggling her proclivity for meaningless sex and her relationship with her kleptomaniac sister Maddie (Amy Madigan, the creepy clownish aunt in Weapons). As she navigates intimate relationships with female and male partners, Eve finds fantasy and reality converging leading to a tense climax that will decide her professional and personal fate.

A contender for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, and long unavailable in the cinema, Female Perversions marks the debut of painter-turned-agent-turned director Susan Streitfeld. The 90s marked the proliferation the New Queer Cinema movement (interestingly Bound, The Watermelon Woman and Set It Off were all released in 1996); in parallel with B. Ruby Rich’s theorisation of the ‘lethal lesbian’, a ‘new cinematic vogue for murderous women’ (see Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss). Female Perversions sits restless in between: sexy, glamorous, almost vampish, Swinton encapsulates the power, erotics and performance of identities as well as the insecurities that professional American women embodied in that era. Following Female Perversions, Swinton went onto collaborate with American artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson.

A restoration by Vinegar Syndrome / Cinématographe

A Hope Runs High release. Presented by Why Are You Being Weird With Me.

The Rio Feminist Film Programming group is Sarah Chorley, Helen de Witt and Selina Robertson. Inspired by the passionate feminist programming work that took place at the Rio in the late 1970s and 1980s, we have reinstated feminist film screenings and events that link the Rio’s feminist past with current feminist urgencies. All are welcome!

"Female Perversions is honoured to be invited by the Rio Feminist Programming group to the Rio ~ such an illustrious group and such a great old cinema...in this day and age of iPhone and home viewing it is truly exciting to have an audience view the film in the way it was imagined...as a provocative and sensuous pleasure"

Susan Streitfeld