Shakedown

From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Leilah Weinraub was the resident videographer for Shakedown, a weekly party in Los Angeles that functioned as a strip club by and for African American lesbians. In this compelling documentary, Weinraub returns to that footage, adding reflective contemporary interviews with key performers, DJs, audience members, and her own musings to create an intoxicating portrait of the creation, flowering, and demise of a utopian moment—and how to represent it after the fact.