What lies beneath: lesbian director Angelina Maccarone talks about turning a female Iranian refugee into a male German factory worker in Unveiled.

If you think it's challenging to be a lesbian in the United States, imagine being gay in Iran. Then imagine that you leave that repressive country to seek asylum in Germany--but the country has tightened its immigration policy and won't accept you. So the best solution you come up with is to take on the identity of a dead man.

That's the setup of Unveiled, a stunning new film from German lesbian filmmaker Angelina Maccarone. The lead character, Fariba, played by the riveting Iranian-German actor-musician Jasmin Tabatabai, makes a convincing male protagonist, but it's Fariba's not-so-macho humanity that captures the heart of a woman at the suburban German sauerkraut factory where she works. Sadly, their sweet affair is undone by a jealous loser who can't otherwise compete with his lesbian rival.

For Maccarone, the film's about more than gender and sexual orientation. "What was interesting to us [Maccarone and cowriter-cinematographer Judith Kaufmann] was the subject of identity. We wanted to tell a story about someone who loses basically everything that makes a person a person: her work, where she lives, who her friends are, her family, her language, and her sexual identity."

Maccarone, who is 40 and lives in Berlin, is a child of immigration herself--her father is Italian and her mother German. While studying literature at the University of Hamburg, she was launched into filmmaking after winning an award for a screenplay treatment. She's made two other lesbian-themed movies--including Everything Will Be Fine, an Audience Award winner at Los Angeles's Outfest in 1998--but Maccarone doesn't want her films ghettoized. "I don't want just gay people to come see my films--I have sat through many heterosexual stories," she says with a laugh.

Her next film, Hounded, which she has just finished shooting in Hamburg, will be quite different but no less provocative. "This will be a scandal," says Maccarone: It's the story of a 50-something female probation officer seduced into an S/M affair by a 17-year-old boy in her charge.

If Unveiled is any indication, Maccarone will find a way to make audiences root for the characters, even in the most unsettling of situations. The most thrilling moment among many in Unveiled occurs when Fariba and her new love, Anne, haltingly and tenderly undress for the first time. "If I had done this film back in the '90s, when it was still an unusual thing to see two women make love, maybe I would have showed a more explicit thing," says Maccarone. "But for this film and this time, I felt it was right to just concentrate on the emotion."

Maccarone, who remains private about her own current relationship--"I'm in a complicated situation right now" is all shell say--is curious about the reception Unveiled will get in its upcoming release. So far, she can judge only from its showing at the Karlovy Vary festival in the Czech Republic. "There were 1,200 people there; it was sold out," she says. "And I think only three people left."