Casa Susanna
Documentary
2022
1 HOUR 37 MINS
Documentary
LGBTQ
In the 1950s and 1960s, deep in the American countryside at the foot of the Catskills, a small wooden house with a barn behind it becomes home to the first clandestine network of cross-dressers.
Cast & Crew
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Matt Roush says...
Dramatized in a play (Casa Valentina) by Harvey Fierstein, the true story of Casa Susanna becomes a fascinating installment of American Experience. Director Sébastien Lifshitz’s film tells the little-known story of a retreat in New York’s Catskills where transgender women and cross-dressing men, many of them heterosexual and married (sometimes with their wives in tow), could be themselves in the repressive 1950s and ’60s. With limited archival footage, much of the house’s history is revealed in the reflections of Diana and Kate, two of those whose lives were changed by their visits there. They return to the property decades later, along with family members of others connected to the home, to remember Susanna Valenti, a former military man whose alter ego ran the house.
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