„#Grab ‘em by the pussy“ is an essay film composed entirely of found footage, assembled from the unstable surface of contemporary image culture. TikTok videos, Instagram stories, YouTube clips, Disney scenes, manosphere monologues, victim testimonies, deepfakes, memes, and fragments of online self performance are brought together until they disclose a larger visual order. Rather than approaching rape culture as a slogan, the film understands it as a structure of repetition, permission, seduction, minimisation and violence.
#Grab ‘em by the pussy, found footage documentary, 110 minutes, 2026
Producer: Nicolas C. Geissler
Dramaturgy: Janina Herhoffer
Music: Sascha Blank
Graphics: Janina Albrecht
Director & Courtesy: Patrick Alan Banfield
It begins with a simple proposition. Rape is the ultimate act, but it does not begin there. It starts much earlier, in the subtle and often normalised forms of sexual boundary violation that we see in jokes, romantic myths, coercive scripts of desire, pornographic fragmentation, locker room speech, image-based abuse, catcalling, entitlement and the routine dismissal of women’s fear. Pop culture does not merely reflect these behaviours. It also helps to rehearse, soften, aestheticise and trivialise them, making them appear flirtatious or even charming.
Therefore, the film is interested not only in perpetrators, but also in the culture that produces ’normal‘ men. It asks how men become complicit in structures they may outwardly reject and how sexual aggression is so often trivialised until it starts to feel ordinary. The film makes an uncomfortable point: no man should be too certain that he has never crossed a boundary, benefited from one being crossed, remained silent when he should have intervened, or participated in the atmosphere that allows such violations to persist. In that sense, men cannot stand outside of rape culture simply because they are not rapists. They are formed within it, rewarded by it and, all too often, protected by it.
I don’t want to make a conventional film. For me, the way it juxtaposes, accumulates and sharpens is at the core. Meaning is constructed through the viewer’s perspective on found footage, which is sometimes easy to categorise and sometimes not, especially when it comes from categories like ‚left‘ and ‚right‘. Multiple storylines develop and reappear throughout the film, with each new element bringing new insight and making your position towards it uncertain. The film takes existing material and allows it to betray itself. Meaning is produced through montage, pressure and the way one image contaminates the next. In this sense, the work shifts attention away from isolated cases and towards recurring structures. It also refuses the comfort of a symbolic response. A solitary Instagram post of solidarity does not constitute transformation. It is often merely symbolic, a moral gesture that leaves everyday language, habits, fantasies and male sociality intact. The question is not how men can appear united, but how they can start to change what they allow, what they perpetuate, what they laugh at, what they ignore, and what they desire.
As a cisgender heterosexual man, I am approaching this material from within the field that I am trying to examine. My artistic training at the Städelschule, in dialogue with artists such as Isaac Julien, Omer Fast and Willem de Rooij, has shaped my understanding of images as agents that produce reality, rather than merely reflecting it. I envisage the film as a rigorous and unsettling essay that rearranges an image field until a different structure emerges. It is a film about rape culture, but also about the visual regime that renders such a culture legible, acceptable, deniable and endlessly reproducible.
„#Grab ‚em by the pussy“ is a spinn-off from the experimental documentary SOYBOY. What started originally as one chapter on sexual violence evolved into a full-length film.
SOYBOY follows the cultural battle for interpretative sovereignty over gender roles that is being played out on the internet, using memes: silly, fast, political and overt miniatures of pop culture. On a journey through the western USA, we develop a documentary project in which we meet people who deal with masculinity: Porn stars, soldiers, supporters of conspiracy theories, men’s rights activists, freefight organisers or transsexual bodybuilders.