Filming Faith and Desire: Encoding and Decoding Identities in Angelina Maccarone's Fremde Haut.

Angelina Maccarone's 2005 feature film Fremde Haut dramatizes the perceived incoherence between homosexuality and Islam through visual iconographies of desire and faith. This article studies the film's protagonist Fariba, an Iranian refugee seeking asylum in Germany, with emphasis on the ambiguous, shifting, and entangled representations of various facets of her identity as a gay Muslim woman. The encoding and decoding of Fariba's identity symbolically suggest a problematic coexistence for faith and queer desire, which become lost in translation between the Middle East and Western Europe. I investigate the film's polysemic codes for gender, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity, with an eye to the Iranian and German sociopolitical climates of the 2000s. Through Fremde Haut's topographies and embodiments, director Maccarone interrogates the high stakes of migration and translation and their implications for human rights and survival at the start of the third millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]