Lady Puritan

Gustine Füdickar, Justin Streichman

GUSTINE FÜDICKAR is a psychotherapist, dance theatre artist and contemplative arts practitioner based in Los Angeles,CA. She maintains a continued commitment to exploring the field of the unconscious through deep theoretical and expressive channels. Füdickar holds an MA in Psychology from Antioch University Los Angeles, an MFA: Contemporary Performance from Naropa University in Colorado, and a BA from Eugene Lang College in New York City.
JUSTIN STREICHMAN is a Los Angeles-based queer filmmaker and editor whose work spans documentary, horror, and experimental filmmaking. His short documentary DALE, featuring the first Asian American woman to join the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has screened internationally at festivals and won multiple Best Short Documentary awards. His editing work has been showcased on PBS, MoMA, the Hammer Museum, the Bienal de La Habana, and Ars Electronica, and includes an Upper Midwest Emmy-nominated documentary episode for Postcards on Pioneer PBS. He holds an MFA from UC Davis and a BA from UCLA.

Director Statement

Lady Puritan emerged from our shared interest in what lives beneath the surface of things, and from a curiosity about how repression, particularly sexual and emotional repression, operates within the myth of America’s puritanical foundations.
The glass of milk at the dining table, the beauty of a floral arrangement, the obsession with being clean—these rituals of innocence mask something older, darker, and unresolved. This film attempts to let that unresolved thing speak.
A woman haunted by her ancestors becomes a metaphor for what it means to carry generational trauma in the body—trauma that distorts, erupts, and eventually demands reckoning. The narrative unfolds through the logic of dreams and nightmares, guided by the belief that what is most terrifying is also most true.
This film is deeply personal for both of us. Gustine grew up in rural Louisiana under the weight of conservative Catholic conditioning and authoritarianism. For Justin, navigating adolescence through the discovery of his queerness, desire itself felt forbidden. For both of us, this project is not just a film, but a kind of invocation: a ritual for naming the unnameable, a mirror for what we’ve inherited, and a scream against it.