"Carl Dreyer loved women, and understood their sociosexual dilemma. This glowing 1943 film about a witch hunt in seventeenth-century Denmark is still a shocker."

"I think of this book as a secret key to understanding the division between stealth “passing” trans women and out trans women in our current culture. Quicksand is about a woman with a mixed background who escapes the racial injustice of America to Denmark in the 1920s. The thing that I’ve always thought was so curious was that Larsen published these books and then became a nurse, never to publish again. Larsen’s life is a mysterious allegory to her writing."

"Strange little silent history of witchcraft out of Denmark, fashioned sort of in the Intolerance shape, featuring incredibly chiaroscuroed mise-en-scène, with plenty of pornish coven action. Being evil never looked so sumptuous. I like the alternate version, Witchcraft Through the Ages, narrated by William S. Burroughs—his voice seems to have been created to discuss any matters supernatural. You can’t tell for sure how much he believes in it, yet still he manages to be equal parts hilarious and menacing!"

"Day of Wrath, for me, is another kind of perfection. It’s mature themes for mature people. It’s about inquisition and war, and no wonder why, after doing that movie about inquisition during the invasion of the Nazis in Denmark, then he was recommended to move away from Denmark just to save himself and family. It’s a very cruel movie about a cruel historical time, but in which some people are put in positions that they have to behave cruel against others, and all the characters are changing. It’s very weird. Even the young girl who is very nice at the beginning, then she starts to turn to a witch, and you know that she’s going to die also, but the weak characters are touching. It’s a very complex movie in terms of the multiple faces that every human has in their life. You have the nice face when the situations are nice, and when the situations turn dramatic and there’s no way out, some people just become evil. What I like about Dreyer is he was studying movies about religion but from a very atheist approach. His movies are about the inside of humankind. It’s such a perfect movie. There are some movies that you see and you go, “Oh, I wish the music was different,” or “I wish the actor was funny,” but there are the movies that you watch over and over and see that there’s not one single frame to change. They’re perfect."

"If what make a work of literature a classic is its ability to be a mirror held up against all times and all human societies — the personal experience and the political one — I think this short novel by Isak Dinesen (or Karen Blixen in her homeland, Denmark) must be in the process of becoming one. Read against our own times it can bee seen as a simple tale about a woman on the run from civil war who seeks refuge in an isolated community. Bringing nothing along with her into her exile but her natural kind spirit and knowledge of the culture of the culinary arts, Babette makes a quiet existence for herself as a simple housekeeper until the day she gets the opportunity to show and share her extraordinary skills. And there is nothing simple about that."

"Another would be Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. I know they finally did a new complete version; they restored it back to the original as close as they could. I think Scorsese was involved with that. I haven’t seen that. I think there’s another 12 minutes added; that’s what I’ve heard. Anyway, that’s been one of my favorite movies forever.I think it’s one of the most important movies I’ve ever seen, because I was like a young teenager when I saw it the first time, and I was so… I mean, I grew up in the countryside in a small village in Denmark, as far from the Lower East Side of New York as you can possibly get, and still I remember just identifying 100 percent with Noodles, the main character. I was feeling everything. I was going through his heartbreak. And I do remember at the time feeling like, “I want to do that. Imagine if I could be in something where someone else could have the experience I just had watching this movie.” So that was a very important film for me. I’ve seen it many times, and it’s just beautiful."