Ileana Pietrobruno

GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (2008) released before Soderbergh version. "Challenges the audience's own desire for the real thing" (Zoë Druick, mediacommons.org https://mediacommons.org/imr/2009/03/31/mock-documentaries-canada-looking-real-thing).

GIRL KING (2002) “A crazed drag king pirate movie set on the shores of some tropicalized Vancouver, it’s jazzed and horny. Hilarious." (Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival).

CAT SWALLOWS PARAKEET AND SPEAKS! (1996) “The mixed morbidity, fantasticism, and quirky humor work surprisingly well. Pietrobruno has a real eye, with handsomely composed imagery. Atmosphere is dreamlike, poetical, oddly sensuous” (Dennis Harvey, Variety Magazine https://variety.com/1997/film/reviews/cat-swallows-parakeet-and-speaks-1117329667/).

All of her films engage with representation and metaphor. "My overriding focus is on the cultural construction of subjectivity. Within this, I work toward a sensuous, layered experience of pleasure and spectacle where humour and theory collide."

In Cat Swallows Parakeet and Speaks!, a modern Scheherazade refuses to be pathologized by science, resorting instead to nonsensical tabloids. In Girl King, pirated masculinity and stolen movie tropes threaten the naturalisation of gender and sexuality. In Girlfriend Experience, the s-x worker's elusiveness suggests that she is a fabrication of the john's desire.

Pietrobruno's films have won awards and screened at over a hundred festivals including the Berlin International Film Festival Panorama, Toronto International Film Festival, Frameline San Francisco, Outfest Los Angeles, Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, New Festival New York.