dir. Simona Kasprowicz / Poland, 2025 / 69’ / semi-documentary / English with Polish subtitles / 18+
The most famous woman in the world was a sex worker. Marilyn Monroe knowingly used sex as a source of income. The first escort of pop culture lived by the economy of sex work. Hollywood slid its hand between her thighs and turned it into a myth — for profit. Her body was stolen, copied, consumed. But what if that body were trans?
Fucking with Marilyn is a 69-minute semi-documentary confronting the myth of an icon with the personal story of Simona Kasprowicz. A scandalous tape that never existed, and a documentary that refuses objectivity. On pop culture’s red casting couch sits a transfeminine body that dismantles the icon and reassembles her on its own terms. What cisheteronormative culture sold as “natural” reveals itself as trans-action: a long-term performance, a role enforced by gazes and social contracts. The icon’s face dissolves into the artist’s; myth gives way to fantasy, where icon and performer become one. Who is watching? How? What do they see — and do they see at all?
Blending documentary and fiction, archive and performance, the film is a post-pornographic essay on the gaze that is never innocent. It intertwines the myth of Marilyn with Simona’s own experience — from her first sex-work client to her fraught relationship with body, sexuality, and love, both absolute and impossible. A sisterly narrative of desire, violence, longing for intimacy, and the need to be recognized.
Content warning: Adults only (18+). Contains nudity, erotic material, references to violence, transphobia, and exclusion, as well as light effects (including strobe). These elements may trigger strong emotions or recall difficult experiences.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I don’t make films to be watched. I make them to finally be “seen”. Watching is fast and superficial; seeing means pausing on a detail—a drop of sweat, a voice breaking. It’s the difference between performance and experience. To be watched is to be violated: the camera pierces the body, strips it of intimacy, and turns it into a commodity—a shadow of another projection. To be seen is only the possibility of a gesture of tenderness, one that almost never happens.
Marilyn Monroe was a product of the gaze—reduced to a dress, a hip, a white smile. An icon the world watched obsessively, yet never truly “saw” as a person. As a queer person, I live under the same social logic. I suspect we both understood that mechanism—we both tried to use it on our own terms, and we were both enraged by its violence. “Fucking with Marilyn” is my refusal to participate in this economy of images. I cut through the myth, undress the glamour, replay the iconic frames, and run them through my own body until the camera starts to stutter.
Icons exist to be reworked. Identity is theft; culture is circulation. I quote, duplicate, remix—other people’s texts, poses, traumas—until I can no longer tell what belongs to me and what to Marilyn. From that point, I enter my own experience: every relationship is part casting couch, part porn, part drinking spree, part therapy, part stupid joke. The body—always too public, always not enough. Real only when someone else is looking.
Sex as labor, sex as struggle, sex as the last language I use to say I’m still here—though most of the time I wish I wasn’t. Violence? Yes—both spectacular and ordinary: at work, in bed, in conversations you no longer want to have. In the absence of love that burns like nicotine withdrawal. Polish everyday life: gigs, NGOs, layoffs, unanswered emails, debts, other people’s rates, depression. And that fucking couch that remembers better than I do.
I keep wondering: by quoting Marilyn, do I reclaim her—or do I appropriate her? Where does homage end and another cultural violation begin? Or perhaps there’s nothing left to violate, since culture itself is a system of endless capture and repetition. My memories are so entangled with borrowed images that even my own orgasm feels like a scene from a B-movie. Technology—including AI—pushes this mechanism to the point of absurdity, feeding me phrases that sound more truthful than my own words.
This is where the film emerges—from the multiplication and replication of the self across roles; from the attempt to retrieve myself from other people’s citations in a world that is perpetual déjà vu. “Fucking with Marilyn” is an exercise in attentiveness to the body and to the gaze that doesn’t consume but tries to meet. It’s a film about love and rage—about the fact that sometimes the only certainty is a burn mark in the couch, and that even in that hole one can still find shelter, if only for a moment.