A Body To Live In w/ Director Angelo Madsen (Bellwether)

Director Angelo Madsen joins us for a post-film discussion.
This screening is free to Amherst Cinema Members.
A BODY TO LIVE IN offers an uncompromising look at the rise of BDSM performance art, body modification and the “modern primitives” cultural movement through the agonies and ecstasies of transgressive artist Fakir Musafar and the communities that surrounded him.
Blending rare archival footage with the voices of queer and artistic trailblazers, the film shows how pain, ritual, and transformation became tools of identity, survival, and self-expression.
Weaving from early experiments and secret gatherings to the emergence of a global subculture shaped by the AIDS crisis and spiritual reinvention, Director Angelo Madsen (NORTH BY CURRENT) reveals not just the story of one artist, but a collective history of bodies in revolt—asking what it truly means to live freely in one’s own skin.
Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax or Angelo Madsen Minax 2005-2024) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and academic. He also curates, writes, performs, and composes. His projects weave personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with interests in self-mythologies, embodiment, and the politics of desire. Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tribeca, De La Warr Pavilion, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, REDCAT, Museum of Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, BFI, dozens of documentary, LGBT, and experimental film festivals, and from garages, basements, attics, hallways, and other alternative venues around the world. He is a Creative Capital Fellow (2025), a United States Artists Fellow (2023), a Guggenheim Fellow (2022), and has participated in residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Headlands, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others.