Penny Arcade

A24 and A MOST VIOLENT YEAR present NYC, 1981. An original short documentary featuring stories from one of the most dangerous years on record for New York City. Featuring Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, performance artist and former Warhol Factory fixture Penny Arcade, actress Johnnie Mae, Harlem street-style legend Dapper Dan, auto body shop owner Nick Rosello, and trucking union rep Wayne Walsh.

Silva fulfills herself a dream: from Poland she flies to USA. With only a few hundred dollars she arrives in New York, incapable of the language. Not long until the charming swindler Avi steals all her money - but she doesn't give up: She hunts him down, follows him around, demanding her money back.

Candy is an aloof heiress caught in an unhappy relationship with her brother. Jackie is a virginal intellectual who believes women are oppressed in contemporary American society. And Holly is a nymphomaniac who has come to loathe men, despite her attraction to them. Together, they join a militant feminist group, P.I.G. (Politically Involved Girls), but their newfound liberation doesn't make them any happier.

A young hipster wannabe-superstar dj, Phil, takes on a day job at a telemarketing company, working with crazy people, ex-prisoners, drug addicts and murderers. The time on his life begins to tick as he battles addiction, fights the law and tries to maintain the only sane thing left in his life, his girlfriend, Christine.

V, an older trans woman, is desperately trying to hold on to her rent stabilized apartment in New York City.

Following the erection of the Berlin wall, special agent Carl Halman is assigned by East German intelligence to move to New York where he’ll “sleep” as a writer until he is called. Using the code-name “April 23,” Carl successfully infiltrates the uptown-downtown literary world in 1950s New York. He edits a magazine, follows the Knicks, and marries Melinda, the socialite wife of best-selling jock novelist Hubert Cleaver, Ayden’s hilarious Norman Mailer pastiche. Through Carl’s eyes, we see New York City change from an outpost of Europe to the new capital of an anarchistic, post-ideological world. But then, when Carl least expects it, he’s called.

At age 73, writer and melancholy master of the bon mot, Quentin Crisp (1908-1999), became an Englishman in New York. Nossiter's camera follows Crisp about the streets of Manhattan, where Crisp seems very much at home, wearing eye shadow, appearing on a makeshift stage, making and repeating wry observations, talking to John Hurt (who played Crisp in the autobiographical TV movie, "The Naked Civil Servant"), and dining with friends. Others who know Crisp comment on him, on his life as an openly gay man with an effeminate manner, and on his place in the history of gays' social struggle. The portrait that emerges is of one wit and of suffering.

Former Warhol Superstar and creator of the seminal sexual politics performance spectacular Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore!, Penny Arcade, washed up on the shores of the Lower East Side of New York as a teenager in 1967. After decades in the Downtown art world, Penny’s personal relationships with dozens of outrageous characters, from the world famous to the fascinatingly obscure, led to the creation of the Lower East Side Biography Project, an oral history of New York’s Bohemian culture from the 1950s to the present. These half-hour biographies have broadcast weekly on Time Warner Manhattan Cable Television for 20 years. Beyond Queer is a feature documentary compiled from these television interviews.