The sex diaries of Anna Fishbeyn
A candid conversation about art, sex, desire and female representation
The filmmaker, actor and writer Anna Fishbeyn.
Anna Fishbeyn is a Russian-born filmmaker, actor, writer and stand up performer. Educated at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, she gave up a highly promising academic career for a life in theater, art and creativity.
In different media, Fishbeyn has created several striking, nakedly autobiographical pieces about women, sex, desire and social roles.
Her feature film debut, Galaxy 360: A Woman’s Playground, is a feminist futurist romp, set in the year 2195, with women holding all the power and men dreaming of getting married.
The movie premiered at the Toronto Film festival last year.
Now Fishbeyn has been seeking alternative distribution models. In New York, she screens the film on Thursdays at the Angelika Film Center and Cafe (18 W. Houston Street). The movie screens next on this week, November 16th. at 7:30 p.m.
(Here is the ticket link.)
During a recent interview with Anna, we talked about the fascinating interplay of her life, work, art and background.
Shadows and Dreams: What led you down this distribution path?
Anna Fishbeyn: Right after Toronto, I had a couple of distributors talk with me about streaming it, which is fine. It was very important for me to have women to be able to experience the film, in different cities and countries, and also have it live in the theater so that people can see it that way.
The way that women have reacted to the film and the community watching it together, with men and women, has been powerful. Women sometimes cry at the end and all that kind of stuff. I really want to try to have it in theaters.
I called Angelika and asked if I could show it at their theater. I've developed a relationship with them. I'm also speaking to theaters in LA and just spoke to someone in Miami.
I do want to stream it [eventually], but my live experience has been incredible.
Shadows and Dreams: The film seems very much of a piece with your theater and cabaret shows?
Anna Fishbeyn: I've been doing this since I first got on stage in 2010 and did “Sex and Mommyville,” at the Flea Theater. That was my most radical move because I had just had two kids, and I had never been on stage before.
The only thing I had done was a show called “Conversations with My Breasts.” I did “Sex and Mommyville,” a play about mothers wanting sex and not really having it, and nobody talking about female sexuality. She has all these other concerns, like kids and a careerist husband. In the play, the husband and wife begin a war, and the only way they come together is when they switch gender roles. They literally switch costumes.
That was my first time exploring this concept on stage, and it was powerful for both the audience and the actors. That started as stand up, but then I introduced eight characters into the play and performed it in several theaters in New York. From there, I began working on a web series called Happy Hour Feminism, which is really the original foundation for the film.
Shadows and Dreams: What was the experience like, personally and professionally?
Anna Fishbeyn: It did very well. We got into over 17 festivals, and we were awarded best web series, best comedy, best screenplay, best direction, and it was incredible. The show was very funny but basic, as it was my first foray into film. The women sat on top of the bar as CEOs and scientists, and the men came in to ask them for advice about their looks.
Happy Hour Feminism was supposed to be futuristic. Each episode focused on different aspects of men's lives. One episode was “The Wolf Period,” where men came in irritable and unable to multitask. Another was “War of the Dads,” comparing stay-at-home dads to working dads.
This concept arose from women who were always arguing with each other over who was better, the working or the stay-at-home mom. I wanted to experiment, and see what happens when the exact same argument among women is now spoken by men.
It was extremely funny when men spoke it.
Shadows and Dreams: So much of your work is self-generated. To what extent is this a function of your frustration with more traditional routes, or perhaps the roles offered to you?
Anna Fishbeyn: It's absolutely 100 percent generated from my personal experiences. I became a feminist as soon as I had children. Before that, I wasn't a strong-willed feminist. Everything seemed perfect, and there was no need to fight for anything. I love to be loved, and I love to be loved by men. I wanted to be liked whenever I went to parties, and I didn’t want to rock the boat. Then I gave birth, and the only thing anybody wanted to ask me was whether the spinach I bought for my child was organic.
I was intellectual, I was reading Nietszche in my spare time, and I was working through books, and I wrote a novel. Neither my extended family nor my ex-husband knew what I was doing all day. They thought I was just changing diapers. I realized this is what was happening to a lot of women. I started reading conversations that were taking place online.
There was one especially reactionary piece about how working women were ruining their lives, and ruining their children’s lives. Women were giving up their seat at the corporate ladder. They’d lose that step, and when they returned to work, they couldn’t get back to that same height. We are essentially trained from birth about how to recreate ourselves to be pleasing to the opposite sex. This didn’t start with my generation, or the previous generation. I’m going back to the ancestral roots of female raising.
Despite my doctorate from Columbia, nobody cared about my intellect anymore. Conversations shifted to mundane aspects of motherhood. I noticed that women stopped talking about their careers and focused on motherhood. I read an article debating the merits of working moms versus stay-at-home moms, which inspired me to write, “Sex and Mommyville.” By the time I got to Happy Hour Feminism, I had traversed different areas and started exploring other themes, such as looks and societal expectations for women.
Originally Galaxy 360 was going to be an episode of Happy Hour Feminism, but as I started working on a male beauty pageant and reversing traditional gender roles, it grew into its own unique futuristic world.
Shadows and Dreams: How has your experience as an actor influenced your work as a director?
Anna Fishbeyn: Galaxy 360 is my first true foray into merging those two roles. My first directorial effort was Invisible Alice, in 2017, a bilingual short film. It was tough but not as demanding as Galaxy 360.
This film had 19 actors and about 30 crew members. I also acted in the film, playing a powerful character with both sexual power and actual power. I discovered that being in charge as both actor and director was empowering. I play this outrageous character who has an enormous amount of power, both sexual power and actual power. I was able to play the role and play the director.
Shadows and Dreams: There’s an essential conflict or tension derived from being both in front and behind the camera?
Anna Fishbeyn: I studied directing at a program in New York. When I made my first short film, I remember I took off all of my makeup, and I remember thinking I’m going to get respect. It didn’t really work. I remember asking a friend of mine, a producer, if he could help me because nobody was listening to me. I asked him to give some of my commands. It was a male crew, and he’d say it, and everybody would listen.
Initially, I struggled with authority on set. With Galaxy 360, I embraced my role fully, which was liberating. In other words, being the director, and playing this powerful character really helped me to be in charge. There were long hours, and they knew I wasn’t on the sidelines directing. I was in the trenches with them. We were all in it together.
The camaraderie with the cast, both men and women, was amazing. We did a lot of improv, and there was a mutual trust that made the process rewarding. The men, the actors, were incredibly sympathetic, and they were open to a lot of my suggestions. You have to trust your actors, and it really worked. I found the dual role to be empowering and meaningful in ways I did not anticipate.
Shadows and Dreams: Your work seems very confessional, emotionally and sexually. What's it like putting yourself out there in this way?
Anna Fishbeyn: It's complicated but liberating. Confession, to me, is a form of revolution. I’ve done a lot of confessional theater. My standup was very confessional. From a young age, I was told to never discuss my sexuality or desires. Women are always put in a kind of prison, and breaking these chains in my work has been empowering.
When I was young, I was told never to discuss my sexual exploits, how I couldn’t have sex, and I had to wait to get married. I had maybe one love before the guy that I ended up marrying. You couldn’t talk about desire as a woman. You couldn't wear red lipstick. I was supposed to be the perfect, modest, pleasing child I had been since I was five.
When I finally awakened after I had the two children, and I got up on stage, and I did “Sex in Mommyville,” the first thing I talked about is sex, and wanting sex.” My mother would tell my grandmother I was performing on stage, and my grandmother would say, “No, she’s not. She’s a professor at Columbia University.”
I see confession as a way to voice the experiences of others who might not have the courage to do so publicly. My work has helped others process their own experiences. I will keep doing it.
Shadows and Dreams: You were born in Moscow, and you came to Chicago. How old were you?
Anna Fishbeyn: I came in the late nineteen-eighties, when I was around seven. It was during Perestroika. We managed to leave Russia on a fluke, as the doors were closed after Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1980.
We got out by a miracle of randomness, and the bureaucracy of the KGB. Growing up, I worked hard to lose my accent to avoid being labeled a communist or a spy. There is always prejudice against you based on the country you are from when you're an immigrant. I passed as an American for many years, and I called myself Annie, and I only officially changed my name back to Anna in college.
Shadows and Dreams: That must have been pretty surreal, growing up a Russian emigre in Chicago?
Anna Fishbeyn: I went to two different high schools, a public school, Wheeling, and Ida Crown, a Jewish academy. At Ida Crown, I spoke fluent Hebrew and was placed in all of the honors classes. I was an A-plus student, and I was the speaker at my graduation. I was a typical Russian immigrant child, focused on education rather than partying.
Shadows and Dreams: Do you feel like you’ve always toggled between worlds, East and West, socialist and democratic?
Anna Fishbeyn: I feel like a complicated amalgam. All of my revolutions are part of the way I was raised, and how I grew up, and the women in my home.
When I talk about women, there are clear cultural differences between Russian and American women. At the same time, there are some glaring similarities. When I made Galaxy 360, I really wanted to make it global. I wanted it to be international. I didn’t want it to apply to just one culture, or one world.
I’ve always had two topics. The one is my bifurcated identity, and even that doesn’t really capture it. It’s more like three or four, Russian, American, Jewish, immigrant, and I have a lot of complexity in my identity, between feeling like a native, and feeling like an immigrant.
The other side of me is the feminist identity. I feel those are the two topics I’ve tackled in my art
