Trailer Watch: Valerie Kontakos Salutes NYC Insurgent Chelly Wilson in “Queen of the Deuce”

“All the pieces you stated about her simply sounded prefer it was made up,” we’re informed in a brand new trailer for Valerie Kontakos’s “Queen of the Deuce.” One among our most anticipated titles screening at DOC NYC, ” the doc recounts the life and exploits of Greek-born enterprise magnate Chelly Wilson. 

“Queen of the Deuce” examines the legacy of Wilson’s homosexual porn cinema empire and her social, entrepreneurial dominion over “The Deuce,” New York’s notorious forty second Road. Described within the synopsis as “a Christmas-celebrating Jewish grandma, a lesbian who married males, and a proud proprietor of porn theaters in Seventies NYC,” Wilson was a strolling paradox whose self contradictions propelled her rise as a enterprise tycoon, matriarch, and socialite in ‘70s New York. With audio recordings of Wilson and interviews with relations, the doc “reveals [Wilson] origins as a taboo-breaking entrepreneur and traces the fraught occasions that result in her departure from Europe on the eve of warfare, and the unconventional trajectories of her American enterprise ventures and private life.”

Set towards the backdrop of social actions together with feminism, homosexual pleasure, and the sexual revolution, Wilson’s story presents an alternative choice to what immigrant success can appear to be in America. Because the “Queen of the Deuce,” she wrote her personal guidelines. “My mom would by no means apologize for who she was – ever,” Wilson’s youngster emphasizes within the trailer. 

Wilson died in 1994.

Kontakos most lately helmed “Mana,” a 2015 doc about six pals who made headlines in Greece after they ran away from house and joined a convent. The younger girls began a shelter for deserted and abused kids. 

“Queen of the Deuce” is now screening at DOC NYC.