Ich bin meine eigene Frau (I am my own Woman) is both feature film and documentary and sketches a fascinating and loving portrait of Lothar Berfelde, born in 1928, who has experienced the recent history of Germany from a far-from- comfortable position of a transsexual. His sexual disposition led Lothar to adopt the name Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, after a village near Berlin.As a noble lady, Charlotte resides in a mansion which she has herself transformed from a ruin into a palace, furnished with her own collection of furniture and junk from the last quarter of the last century, which is known as the Gründerzeit. Unfortunately the palace is situated in the territory of the former DDR. Not without problems, for all those years it was the only private museum in the former ‘workers’ paradise’ (which was hardly a pleasure-ground for collectors nor for people with a deviant sexual disposition). Charlotte played a central role in the oppressed DDR gay movement and her ‘museum’ functioned as a kind of underground club. The fall of the Wall did not just bring freedom to Charlotte, it also resulted in insuperable financial problems: her palace has been discovered by the tax authorities. She has also found herself on the wrong end of the extreme right.Von Praunheim provides a chronological picture of Charlotte’s life using feature film fragments juxtaposed with documentary interviews with Charlotte. Two actors play the young and very young Charlotte; the real Charlotte plays herself at an advanced age.
