Exclusive: New Restoration of Queer Drama By Hook or By Crook Acquired by Altered Innocence for Spring 2025 Release

We’re pleased to exclusively announce that Altered Innocence has acquired the restoration of the critically lauded queer film By Hook or by Crook ahead of its world premiere restoration screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on December 5, 2024. Altered Innocence has exclusively acquired all North American rights, with a planned theatrical release in Spring 2025. 

By Hook or by Crook marks the feature film debut of three iconic queer filmmakers: film & TV director Silas Howard (Darby and the Dead, Pose, Transparent, Dickinson, A Kid Like Jake); author, visual artist and Guggenheim fellow Harry Dodge (My Meteorite, Or Without The Random There Can Be No New Thing—Penguin US, Harvill Secker UK); and Emmy nominated producer Steak House (Shudder’s Queer for Fear, Disney+ series Launchpad and The Mustang for Focus Features).

The film’s new restoration will world premiere on Thursday, December 5^th, 2024 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures as part of their upcoming series Present Past: A Celebration of Film Preservation. Pioneering musician and writer Kathleen Hannah will moderate a post-screening discussion with the filmmakers.

The film has been digitally restored by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with Frameline, Outfest, Steakhaus Productions, Inc., and the Sundance Institute. The film was remastered using the latest technology with improved color correction to achieve the filmmakers’ original cinematic vision.

By Hook or by Crook, starring Howard, Dodge, Stanya Kahn, and Carina Gia, was an immediate sensation upon its world premiere at Sundance in 2002, galvanizing audiences of all stripes with its never-before-seen portrayal of two working-class, trans/butch buddy grifters willfully existing on the margins of society. The film received worldwide acclaim, garnering numerous festival awards, including Audience and Jury Awards at SXSW and Outfest, and a prestigious national theatrical release in 2003.

The film, written and directed by Harry Dodge and Silas Howard and produced by Steak House, Silas Howard, and Harry Dodge, provocatively explores issues of queer representation, gender, and trans identity in ways that contemporary LGBTQIA+ culture and cinema are still catching up with.

The acquisition was negotiated by Frank Jaffe at Altered Innocence, and Steak House and attorney Mark Vega of Incite Law Group on behalf of the filmmakers.

Hook by Crook, photo courtesy of Altered Innocence

Said Jaffe, “By Hook or by Crook is an early queer masterpiece, and in today’s world the film continues to have a lasting and profound cultural resonance. I’m thrilled to be able to help the filmmakers bring their tender and engaging story back into the hearts and homes of audiences with this new high-definition restoration.”

Said filmmakers Dodge, Howard, and House, “For over 20 years, our film has inspired audiences and cultivated discussion of LGBTQIA+ culture, gender, and identity. It is a testament to the power of making radical underground queer art that the film feels as important today as it was when we made it. We cannot imagine a better partner than Altered Innocence, a truly innovative and visionary distributor.”

By Hook or by Crook is a trans/butch buddy film that chronicles three weeks in the life of Shy, a handsome, gender-bending, small-town dreamer with a nagging messiah complex, and Valentine, a deliriously expressive, wise-acre adoptee on a misguided search for his birth mother. The two freaky grifters join forces and learn the true meaning of “poise under pressure” in this visually stunning and wonderfully acted, anti-authoritarian tale of friendship, trust, and redemption.

Altered Innocence was founded in 2015 with a focus on bringing international and cutting-edge LGTQ and coming-of-age cinema to North American audiences. Notable releases have included Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker, Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible: Straight Cut, the Cannes competition film Knife+Heart, Iceland’s submission for the 95th Academy Awards® Beautiful Beings, the U.S. Premiere of Spain’s previously unreleased cult title Arrebato (Rapture), the first U.S. theatrical release of Paul Vecchiali’s The Strangler (l’étrangleur), and the films of celebrated French auteur filmmaker Bertrand Mandico (The Wild Boys, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), She Is Conann).