Grand Central Hotel

Grand Central Hotel is a ruminative portrait about the iconoclastic American composer, writer, transgender activist, and avant-garde sound collagist Terre Thaemlitz (better known by her moniker DJ Sprinkles). She remains hidden as one of the most influential multidisciplinary and critically antagonistic artists of the last 30 years.

The film follows Terre as she arrives at a nondescript hotel for a night and maps for viewers her conflict with gender and identity constructs, her frustration as an aging MTF trans person, and a brazen twist that becomes a radical gesture and astute political statement. The film reveals a rare shrewdness and a solitary struggle for autonomy and it's precarious shifts.

Film completed July 2021.

  • Serge Garcia
    Director
  • Terre Thaemlitz
    Writer
  • Serge Garcia
    Writer
  • Serge Garcia
    Producer
  • Terre Thaemlitz
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    20 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    July 4, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    3,500 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    Germany
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • FIDMarseille —Marseille International Film Festival
    Marseille
    France
    July 19, 2021
    World Premiere
    Official Selection / Flash Competition
  • I GOT UP, Group Exibition @ GB Agency
    Paris
    France
    October 21, 2021
    Paris Premiere
  • Visionäre Film Festival
    Berlin
    Germany
    November 13, 2021
    German Premiere
Director Biography - Serge Garcia

Serge Garcia is a filmmaker with a penchant for aimlessly wandering. His films emphasize intersectional narratives that explore loneliness, alienation, and possibilities for agency. He's developed a body of work through music videos, underground documentaries and narrative shorts. He uses family, culture, social histories, and his own experience as a first generation Mexican-Guatemalan-American. Born in Los Angeles and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area he is now based in Berlin, Germany.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

There are few who succeed in bringing together art, theory and politics so consistently and convincingly as the American transgender artist Terre Thaemlitz (*1968). Whether as a musician, multimedia producer, writer, DJ or label owner of Comatonse Recordings, Thaemlitz generates and operates within a highly sensitive and reflected space. The clarity of this space gives her music, videos and texts their specific profoundness and poetic force. Thaemlitz’s work critically combines themes of identity politics – including gender, sexuality, social class, language, ethnicity, and race – with an ongoing analysis of the socio-economic conditions under which most music is currently produced and marketed.

It is important to acknowledge that Terre maintains control of her narrative as writer of the film. I am cis man highlighting her trans experience so it's critical that I reckon with my relationship with queerness, gender systems, and identity constructs that don't reinscribe stereotypes or uphold patriarchal values. That is my starting point. In the making of the film my objective was to facilitate a collaboration where the nuances of Terre's experience and story are told in her own words.

The less we see, the more it complicates the idea of visibility and the notion that visibility equals social mobility. The less we see the more it allows us so see and hear differently without the predictable bells and whistles of how films more often than not tell us to see/feel. I used camera placement and composition in a way that could also embellish the notion of secrecy and the closet. It's an approach that aims to confront contemporary discourse on identity and it's relationship to mainstream cinematic language that sells. We’re able to hear Terre more clearly as a result. Eliminating unnecessary cutting means that Terre exists as they are, full of stories but not for a story.

Grand Central Hotel is a beacon of thought for radical thinkers around gender, feminism, contemporary queer culture, and dance music history.