Directed by: Monika Treut
Stars: Shelley Kästner, Alfred Edel, Annie Sprinkle, Michael Massee, Mary Lou Grailau, David Bronstein, Dominique Gaspar, Flora Gasper
Language: English
Country: Germany, United States | Imdb Info

Also known as: My Father is Coming – Ein Bayer in New York

Description: Vicky is a young German actress struggling to make it in New York’s East Village. She waits tables between auditions and has carefully allowed her father back home to believe that she is successful, happily married, and living the glamorous life she once promised herself.

Then Hans announces that he is coming to visit.

Vicky quickly persuades her gay roommate Ben to pose as her husband, but the deception becomes harder to maintain as her real life keeps intruding. She is attracted to her coworker Lisa, becomes intrigued by the mysterious Joe, and moves through a downtown world where sexuality and identity are treated with far more freedom than her conservative father expects.

Hans initially responds with confusion, but New York begins working on him as well. An encounter with erotic performance artist Annie Sprinkle opens the door to a completely different side of the city, turning the supposedly conventional father into an unexpectedly curious participant in Vicky’s unconventional world.

What begins as a comedy about hiding lovers and inventing a fake marriage gradually becomes a warm, mischievous story about sexual discovery, honesty, and two generations learning that desire rarely follows the respectable script they were given.

My Father Is Coming blends queer comedy, erotic curiosity, downtown eccentricity, and early-90s New York atmosphere. Its sexual politics are playful rather than heavy-handed, filled with flirtation, unconventional relationships, and the sense that the East Village offers everyone—including Dad—a chance to reinvent themselves.

Legacy Note: Directed by Monika Treut, the film continues her fascination with sexual identity, female desire, and people living outside traditional categories, but approaches those themes with an unusually light and affectionate comic tone.

Shelley Kästner gives Vicky an appealing mixture of ambition, embarrassment, and curiosity, while Alfred Edel turns Hans from an apparent conservative obstacle into one of the film’s most surprising characters. Annie Sprinkle, appearing as a version of herself, brings an unmistakable sex-positive energy to the story.

Shot around the East Village and other New York locations, the film now also works as a vivid time capsule of a downtown culture built around artists, queer communities, performance, experimentation, and sexual freedom. Funny, sexy, eccentric, and unexpectedly tender, My Father Is Coming celebrates the idea that growing up—and loosening up—can happen at any age.