An eight-year-old is suffering because people keep addressing the child in ways that cause discomfort. They insist on calling the child by the birth name Aitor. And the nickname, Cocó, even if less obviously wrong, does not feel right either. During a summer in the Basque country, the child confides these worries to relatives and friends. But how can a mother handle her child’s quest for identity when she is herself still dealing with her own ambivalent parental legacy? Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s debut feature is a sunny drama. This wonderfully sensitive work is carried by heart-wrenching performances from newcomer Sofía Otero as the little girl in search of a name and Patricia López Arnaiz as her conflicted yet loving mother. But, just as a multitude of bees ensure nature’s diversity, supporting roles are no less essential for the film’s heroine, anda largely female environment shows her some of the diverse ways in which it is possible to be a woman. By adopting more than one point of view, Urresola is respecting the incredible complexity that is gender identity, and touching on one perhaps less obvious aspect of transitioning: your mentality.
Bergamo, northern Italy. Fede’s days are spent between school and a home run by nuns. In a corridor of the Pensionato, Fede sees Valentina, a new tenant, for the first time. In the middle of a choreography of open, semi-open and closed doors, unknown feelings arise. As sudden as the luminosity of a flashlight entering a room at night. As odd as mixing new flavours. Another world is born inside the one Fede knew, with different questions and possibilities. What does it mean to desire?
Morning routines and conversations in bed, gossip and real talk. In encounters and interviews, D. Smith portrays four Black trans sexworkers in New York and Georgia. The protagonists discuss their lives with relish but without any sugar-coating. The conversations that emerge are deep and passionate reflections on socio-political and social realities as well as perceptive analyses of belonging and identity within the Black community and beyond. Dramatisations and reconstructions, performative interventions and associative collages of biographical set pieces are brought together organically in haunting black-and-white images accompanied by a carefully deployed soundtrack. Dreams and memories, battles fought and crises overcome are openly addressed without skirting topics such as precarityand violence. The protagonists also tell us about their lovers, friends and families, and how these relationships are marked by taboos and fetishisation, but also by their own desires. This vibrant portrait gives them space for their uninhibited and defiant narratives and undermines white, cis-heteronormative assumptions and stigmatisations.
Aaron is determined not to forget his ex-boyfriend Paul. He believes that the only way to preserve the memory of their caresses and kisses is to stop brushing his teeth. To him, all their emotions, all their touching and intimacies are stored in his teeth. His younger sisterand flatmate Lina gently tries to persuade her brother to practice oral hygiene, but she is no longer able to get through to him. When Aaron and Lina’s authoritarian father comes to visit, the situation escalates and Aaron’s behaviour becomes dangerously self-destructive. Lukas Röder, a student of the HFF in Munich, addresses the topic of mental health in his touching chamber piece. Via the actors’ intensely emotional performances and a second layer in which everyone involved reflects on their roles, behavioural patterns and ways of finding help are explored.
Love to Love You, Donna Summer tells the extraordinary story of disco queen Donna Summer through a rich archive of unpublished film excerpts, home video, photographs, artwork, writings, personal audio and other recordings that span the life of one of the most iconic performers ever to shake a room to its timbers. From her early career with Giorgio Moroder in Germany, to later years more focused on spirituality and family life as a shelter from troubles associated with both notoriety and intimate wounds, her story is all the more special for being told in the first person – both singular and plural. Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams and Summer’s daughter Brooklyn Sudano’s film has benefitted from Sudano’s privileged perspective, and her access to family members has helped gather a treasure of memories and material. But the intelligence and effect of the duo’s filmmaking approach itself is truly striking. Thanks to the skilful assimilation of audio testimonies into this wealth of images, we are able to discover – or rediscover – how complete an artist Donna Summer was. A key creator of her innovative hit songs, an articulate and funny entertainer and even a talented painter, this emancipated woman invented a lot – herself included.
This school-age tragedy is set in a secondary school in Tokyo over five days during which a typhoon grows, rages, and abates. After class clown Akira is caught watching his fellow students partying at the school’s indoor pool, he is deemed a peeping tom and held underwater so long he almost drowns. Meanwhile, the teacher who has been summoned has his own problems: the mother and uncle of a fellow teacher with whom he is having an affair are trying to force him to marry her, so he doesn’t have much attention to spare for the woes of his pupils. The children talk about life, death, and reincarnation; about a lesbian couple among them, and about the typhoon. As the storm draws closer, a sense of aggression swells among the schoolchildren … The storm of emotions in Typhoon Club is unleashed with the insistence of a force of nature. In an escalating rondel of episodes, including a brawl and an attempted rape, the film depicts a“spring awakening” with feelings erupting like hot lava flows. It captures the self-sufficient world of youth poised between exuberance and depression, while the camera keeps a respectful distance.
SCREENING TIMES:
21.02. /21.02. / 19:00 Cubix 3
RERUNS:
After 21.02. / 21:30 Cubix 2
Almamula 21.02. / 15:30 Cineplex Titania
El castillo (The Castle) 21.02. / 10:00 Cubix 9
Femme 21.02. / 21:30 Cineplex Titania
Hummingbirds 21.02. / 20:00 Urania
It’s a Date 21.02. / 21:30 Cubix 9
Knochen und Namen (Bones and Names) 21.02. / 10:00 Cubix 6
Langer Langer Kuss (Long Long Kiss) 21.02. / 19:00 International
Mangosteen 21.02. / 14:00 Werkstattkino@silent green
It’s already half time at the Berlinale and the time flew by. Nevertheless, we still have some films that celebrate their premiere today.
If you can’t find anything for you at the premieres, our reruns are listed below again.
We also have a few events planned for today. We have two of our Directors Exchange’s with the topics “Time after time, club culture and the concept of time in Queer Cinema” and “Journeys of rebellion and truth, Trans* narratives as tools of unapologetic self-representation.” If that’s not enough for you, our TEDDY Talk: QueerWeb Part 1 will also take place today. More about the events can be found here.
One day their paths cross again, by chance. Alice, now an internationally acclaimed cellist, has a series of performances at the concert hall where Jo works. A decade has passed since their year spent as scholarship students at an exclusive girls’ boarding school deep in the Australian outback, where the focus was on developing one’s personality, independence, strength and resilience, as well as forming a bond with nature and a sense of community among the pupils. The dormitories were in remote wooden huts and the girls were largely left to their own devices in their spare time. Although Jo quickly bonded with the shy Alice, not wanting to remain an outsider, she gravitated towards the girls higher up in the pecking order under the sway of the dominant Portia – at least that is how Jo remembers it. But Alice confronts her with a completely different version of events. Based on Rebecca Starford’s eponymous memoir, writers Pip Karmel and Magda Wozniak and director Corrie Chen tell a gripping and unsparing story of how the desire to belong can set in motion a dynamic that is as cruel as it is crucial.
“I want to remember this time, last time, and next time. I want to remember it all with no parts missing, because I appreciate even the bad times.”
In Laredo, a city in southern Texas on the Mexican border, best friends Silvia and Beba know that the long summer nights of theirteen age years cannot last forever. Their hang-out spots are so familiar but, stuck in an immigration process over which deportation hangs as a constant possibility, home still seems a fragile concept. Between bars, drive-thrus, friends’ couches and the border wastelands, they confront the stresses of survival, the future, and community building. For them, this means protest action for legal abortion and against border control abuses, in a politically divided America. But the dusty half-light is also a time for poetry and dreams. Their laughter and creative expression cement a sense of solidarity and belonging in togetherness.
The apartment is so high up that the noise of the city below barely penetrates, the sound of the traffic and the passing trains merges with the wind and the ventilation system, a constant background hum. It only recedes when the four young Cubans speak, although they’re never seen together, they just talk to their phones and their phones respond, conversations with loved ones, sales consultations, adviceservices for immigrants, chats with the director, news reports, lip-synced pop renditions, calls not always picked up. They can be as fabulous as they want in the apartment, but the lift that brings them down to the Moscow streets is already a different space, where you stare out in front of you and avoid attracting attention; Russia and Cuba are so very far apart. It’s hard not to feel melancholy when faced with an emptied-out city and endless snow, and this winter is unlike all the others, not just darkness, but war and disease, signs of the times. But hope is still there, waiting at the other end of the line, with calm, with patience, home is many things at once, what else can it be right now? It’s small comfort, but there’s no comfort too small: everything little by little.
Mangosteen tells the story of Earth, a young man who returns to his hometown, Rayong, where his sister, Ink, runs a fruit processing factory. During a casual meeting, Earth finds out that his definition of the term “future” is drastically different from his sister’s. The more he tries to involve himself in the fruit juice business, the less he feels needed there. Earth eventually decides to distance himself from the family operation and resumes his old hobby, writing a violent, psychic, irrational, abstract, gory, and unrealistic novel. Switching narrative directions as well as languages, Mangosteen weaves a meandering path through factory floors and orchards. The film was shot on outdated Digital8 video cameras and follows no clear narrative logic. It is a film as much about storytelling as it is about its protagonist’s erratic and surprising idiosyncrasies.
“For two years starting in 2020, this work has been forming along the edges of disquiet and premonition, in fragments and intensities, through wandering and not-staying. It has tried to find language for and ways across the bizarre upheavals of social and political values with the rise of fascism in India and a global pandemic. It has insisted on being amongst the things that keep from falling apart. Filmed in Delhi, these incomplete fictions are of the people, places, and protests that keep the language of hatred at bay and absorb the city’s griefand euphoria. In them are the continuous echoes of a violent and tenuous present. The false closures and tenuous associations in this video/essay compose a timeline of the city at an angle through the time of this work. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who un-dreams it all; a stranger, who it turns out, is no stranger at all.” Priya Sen
In a home for struggling girls, young Milo is secretly transitioning gender. Only care worker Nicki is aware of it and supports them. Whenever Milo feels angry, or like running away or just wants a change of scenery, it’s Nicki who brings a feeling of security and home. One day, through the thin walls of the institution, Milo hears something they wish they hadn’t. As hugs cannot solve every conflict, they push the emergency button.
Meticulously, they inspect their own body as the camera looks on, documenting every step of their transition. Yet what starts off as a young filmmaker’s audiovisual diary soon expands into a confrontation with their own past. It is not easy to break out of a cocoon spun from motherly demands and grievances – especially when your body gets treated as a family matter, and when your need for autonomy is met with incomprehension.
Justina and her daughter Alexia are trying to maintain the huge house that the former housekeeper has inherited from her boss. But the two Indigenous women do not have the means to pay for the upkeep of the decaying property. The money they get from selling the house’s contents online and its cattle is just a drop in the ocean. Moreover, the former owner’s family visits regularly and insists on continuing to treat Justina and Alexia like servants. Alexia refuses to accept this role any longer; she intends to return to the city to work as a car mechanic and start conquering the world as a racing driver. The film’s mixture of documentary-style footage and dramatised scenes tinged with horror turns the house into an enchanted castle that refuses to let go of its inhabitants. The patchy mobile phone reception becomes a metaphor for the pair’s marginalisation as they struggle with their circumstances. The insurmountable class barriers that exist in Argentina serve to hold Justina captive in her social class, even after she herself becomes a house and land owner. A dark fairy tale.
O estranho, the intrusion, is a place: Guarulhos International Airport near São Paulo. From there, the journey proceeds not so much through the world as through time. Built on Indigenous territory, the airport completely changed the landscape. Some people left, others remained: they now work in the duty-free shop or in baggage handling.T he past reappears in various forms, challenging the protagonists, including Alê. Right there, in the riverbed where she used to play with her sister, she now works all day long. Just as the concrete covers the vegetation, which covered the graves in turn, the stories pile up, layer upon layer. They offer food forthought about what remains. The film moves between fiction and reality, carrying out a minimal form of archaeology. Its rhythm uncoversthe images of a vibrant place. O estranho is the second joint project by Flora Dias and Juruna Mallon and shows their interest in landscapes, in people and in theinterplay of the two. And in keeping memories alive.
A collection of images reproduced from films, museums, and archives, Exhibition weaves together multiple biographies and texts to construct a single imaginary subject. Eija-Riitta Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer marries the Berlin Wall and turns her home into a museum of architectural miniatures to abate her longing for those objects. Mary Richardson stabs Diego Velázquez’s “The Toilet of Venus” as an act of protest and dedication to an imprisoned suffragette. Shifting into first person point-of-view, the narration combines quotations from the painter Agnes Martin, early eye tracking studies, Sigmund Freud’s case history of “Rat Man,” and an account of a Klein bottle’s misuseas a candlestick holder. The film fragments, copies, and excerpts to create a portrait of desire and trespass, becoming a meditation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood. “I’m not a woman. I’m a doorknob.”
The phenomenon that the context in which images are seen determines both the way in which they are perceived and their effect is impressively demonstrated by the artistic duo Soda Jerk in their latest work Hello Dankness. By assembling scenes from various films in new contexts, partially manipulating them and combining them with new soundtracks, Soda Jerk create an unexpected narrative about the profound changes in US society since Trump’s presidency. Images from the media in recent years – from the 2016 US elections, the pandemic and the #MeToo debate – are cleverly integrated into scenes from films such as American Beauty and Wayne’s World. As a result of this playful combination with borrowings from pop culture, the film constantly develops new and absurd twists. Using only found footage, Soda Jerk have created a refreshingly anarchistic and multi-layered work that explores topics such as fake news, deepfakes and conspiracy narratives but also the politics of images: how they spread, whom they serve or harm and how they are permanently subject to reinterpretation.
Two decades after the Civil Rights Movement, James Baldwin revisits historical places stretching from the South to the North – from Selma and Birmingham, Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia and on to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida and the Dr MartinLuther King Memorial in Washington, D. C. On this journey down memory lane, he engages in conversations with friends, activists and fellow writers such as Amiri Baraka, Oretha Castle Haley and Chinua Achebe, reflecting on the past events that sparked the fight against racial segregation, the attacks on churches, racist police brutality and the arbitrary injustices which the Black population had to endure. Questioning their own legacy, these luminaries look at the present and how little has actually been achieved in the wake of the movement, and we, the audience are equally encouraged to reflect on our own era. Dick Fontaine skilfully weaves archival materials into the accounts, making his film at once a poignant historical document and highly relevant today in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Kyiv in 2022. A car races at breakneck speed through the city at dawn. Filmed from a subjective camera angle in a single unedited shot, this contemporary remake of Claude Lelouch’s film C’etait un rendez-vous captures the emotions in a state of emergency caused by the war.
“Don’t ask me how I feel about something if you don’t want to hear it!” “I do want to hear it, but sometimes it’s just not true.” Actor Boris and writer Jonathan are a couple. But their relationship has reached a point where they might as well spend their evenings together separately: one lies in bed reading scripts, while the other works at a desk in the next room. Immersing himself deeper and deeper into rehearsals for a new film with an ambitious director, Boris begins to confuse real and fictional characters; meanwhile, Jonathan tries to redefine his voice as a writer. During these days spent struggling with emotional distance and closeness, trust, desire and fear of loss, Boris’s little niece Josie flits about like Shakespeare’s Puck, testing her boundaries. Knochen und Namen is actor Fabian Stumm’s directorial and screenplay feature-length debut. Unfolding in humorous and tender sequences that take place in demarcated, characteristic settings (bedroom, supermarket and rehearsal room), his film is an intelligent and entertaining reflection on relationships.
Marungka tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black) follows Yankunytjatjara man Derik Lynch’s road trip back to Country for spiritual healing, as memories from his childhood return. A journey from the oppression of white city life in Adelaide, back home to his remote Anangu Community (Aputula) to perform on sacred Inma ground. Inma is a traditional form of storytelling using the visual, verbal and physical. It is how Anangu Tjukurpa (story connected to country / dreaming / myth / lore) have been passed down for over 60,000 years from generation to generation.
April 2022 in France. The presidential election is entering its final round and the atmosphere is tense. Solène, a waitress, drifts throughthe night. She takes drugs, hurts people’s feelings and increasingly loses her grip.
“In the middle of the lake we’d sometimes see fish trapped in the ice lined up beside one another. I thought they spent the winter there, then woke up in the spring. I thought they came back to life and breathed again, like before.”
In a youth correctional facility, Joe is preparing for his return to society, uncertain as to what life will look like on the other side of the barbed-wire fence. But when new arrival William moves into the cell next door, Joe’s desire for freedom quickly gives way to a desire of another kind. Through camera obscura photography, ink drawing, dance and rap, Joe and William embark on a twin journey of emotional and expressive emancipation, revolving around each other with increasing yearning and despair. This debut feature charts the twists and turns of a passion between two young men who thought their lives had been put on hold and offers an uncompromising vision of love: behind these walls, passion comes first, and liberty only a distant second.
On the final day of his shoot in Paris, German filmmaker Tomas is visibly tense. He is all stern exactitude as he explains to his extras just precisely how to position their hands or what their motivation is as they walk down a flight of stairs – right up until the final slate. At the wrap party, Tomas falls first into the arms of his British husband Martin, but then he meets a young primary school teacher, Agathe. Adance develops into a flirtation and then into a passionate night together. The next morning, Tomas proudly tells Martin that he has slept with a woman. As this one-night stand grows into something more, the relationship between the two men begins to change. A tale of relationships that is marked by passion, jealousy and narcissism unfolds in which each shows scant sensitivity for the needs of the others. Ira Sachs’ latest work, his sixth outing in Panorama, once again proves his talent for carefully observed relationship dramas. There is a hint of French cinema and a tang of Fassbinder wafting around the three protagonists as their personal wounds constantly redefine the power relations between them.
When 23-year-old Franky hears the words “I love you” from her boyfriend after sex, her response is merely: “Whatever, I’ll see you later.” As a child, she was seriously injured by a fire and this has left its mark on more than just her body. For 15 years, she has been trying to bring those responsible to justice. Franky is now working as a nurse in the very hospital where, back then, her life was saved. She is a welcome sight in every room and finds the right words for every patient, including the impetuous Florence. The two fall in love, and Franky runs away from her domineering family in London’s working-class Dagenham to find instead a safe haven with Florence and her patchwork family. But the past will not let her rest, and it is not long before cracks begin to appear in her relationship with Florence. Silver Haze is the second collaboration between director Sacha Polak and non-professional actor Vicky Knight. The story is based on improvisations and recollections of true events from Vicky Knight’s life. The sensual camera captures images that are immediate and raw but also gently poetic.
Irma Countess von Sztáray does not have it easy. Shortly before her application to become lady-in-waiting to Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary known as “Sisi”, Irma gets a bloody nose from her strict mother in all the excitement. Then, at court, she is put on display like a prize cow and interrogated. At Sisi’s summer residence on Corfu, Irma first has to prove her athleticism in sadistic exercises and is then put on a diet of cocaine extracts before she finally meets the moody and erratic empress in person. In between laxative teas and watery soups, hikes and beauty treatments, the two very different women quickly become close – though only as close as Sisi will allow, naturally. But every summer has an end, and when they return to Vienna, the lives of Sisi and Irma change drastically. In her wild reinterpretation of the oft-told “Sisi” myth, Frauke Finsterwalder unleashes two acting forces of nature – Susanne Wolff and Sandra Hüller – on each other and allows them to upstage each other. With stunning costumes by Tanja Hausner and set to a soundtrack by Nico, Portishead and Le Tigre, the film transports us to a world dominated by women to which, apart from the queer maids, only the gay Archduke Viktor has access.
During the pandemic, the European filmmaker travels to Los Angeles, which is no stranger to spectacle and disaster. Under the Hollywood sign, being constantly in motion is de rigueur: never stop, never look too closely, never develop a feeling of being here. Long tracking shots from the safety of the Ford Mustang take in the city, whose shimmering surfaces reflect back to the filmmaker his own perspective, shaped by cultural criticism. The voids diagnosed by Baudrillard and Bégout, the missing connections, the meaninglessness, the end of the world which has perhaps already occurred, look surprisingly exciting through the tired eyes of the Old World: a 40-year-old love story is rekindled, love’s movements fall out of the cool flow of time, coyotes conquer the gardens, snakes swim in the pools. A chorus of actors share doomsday poems by E. E. Cummings, Ocean Vuong, Claudia Rankine and more with each other; these voices from the New World interrupt the French commentary. And two 70-plus bodies from two extinct worlds synchronise tenderly with the cinema of attractions.
In a Colombian prison in 2012, the left-wing intellectual FARC rebel Jaison and the hitherto apolitical trans former sex worker Laura fall inlove. Their bond initially causes distrust within the FARC, but the charismatic Jaison is able to dispel such misgivings by calling for acommon class struggle, and evoking a sense of solidarity that draws on the shared experience of discrimination. This utopia of a just world sees trans activists stand together with disarmed FARC fighters at demos in Bogotá’s red-light district and in FARC camps in the mountains. Thus, the Trans FARC begins to fight together for a society where trans rights are part of the peace treaty and where shared parenthood is possible for trans sex workers such as Daniela and Max. The FARC has been portrayed many times in documentaries in recent years, but director Joris Lachaise comprehensively depicts an entirely new aspect. His film organically interweaves different periods and footage shot by the protagonists themselves in various prisons. The title of the film, Transfariana, refers to the female FARC members, the “Farianas”.
We’re excited to have four fantastic DJs on board who will provide the best sound for the big TEDDY Party at Berlin’s Volksbühne.
Pat Bernetti started her career in NYC and now resides in Berlin, playing in clubs, festivals, awards, galas and events all over the world, where she thrills the party crowds with her mix of RnB, Hip Hop, House, Pop, Funk, Oldies, Rock, Electro Swing & Charts.
DJ Trust.The.Girl is electrifying queer crowds all over Germany with her colorful, vibrant mix of diverse genres.
Amperia is a queer, non binary Berlin-based DJ. Known for their party Golosissima and as resident and curator of Autopoiesis and poly|motion, they will be playing a driving techno house set.
Ābnamā: a can of worms wearing lipstick on the can, a return to the source of all things considered and a flashback to bearings lost but never had. Based in Berlin, co-organizer and resident at DUMP, she is known for driving grooves that span across various genres.
Paris at night. The driving bass of a sound system thunders through an underground car park. On the dance floor of a club, the revellers allow themselves be propelled by techno, enveloped in smoke and light, communicating only with their bodies. Félicie is approached by her ex-girlfriend, but she turns away. In the next room, the music is quieter. People get talking, consume drugs or take a break before throwing themselves into the dancing once more. This is where Félicie meets Saïd who has just come from his shift as a driver and tells her about the “gilets jaunes” protests. Félicie suggests that they move on to party at her place while the other revellers continue to abandon themselves to the night. In clear-eyed close-ups that float amidst an ever-developing soundscape, director Anthony Lapia captures the anatomy and energy of aparty just as well as the gradual transition to the quieter world of the afterparty. On the cusp between night and day, different lives and views collide before, more or less gently but inexorably, everyday life returns.
“He’s not the first boy who’s missing in the forest. The boy that was with him says that a monster has taken him.”
Santiago del Estero, northern Argentina. When Nino is deemed a bad influence to the other boys in his neighbourhood and has toendure homophobic attacks on the streets, his parents temporarily move the family to the countryside. Away from the city, Nino wandersin a forest supposedly haunted by the Almamula, a monster that takes those who commit carnal sins and impure acts. It’s summer: thebodies sweat, the line between dream and reality becomes blurry. A boy disappears. In a world surrounded by whispers, unspokendesires and prayers, Nino’s curiosity and impulses surface. As an escape from a reality flooded with toxicity, repressions, interdictionsand imminent violence, the hidden and sensuous mysteries of the forest become increasingly attractive to Nino.
“We’ll grow up, we’ll make mistakes, and learn from them, we’ll suffer, we’ll laugh out loud, we’ll age, we’ll get sick, we’ll die. In themeantime, dear Felipe Zavala, we must live.”
Felipe has a dream – he is on stage and passionately performing while his mother, grandmother and his deceased father are part of the audience and watch him enthusiastically. After waking up, reality catches up with him again. He’s part of a theatre group with his friends, at night he writes his own plays, but he keeps from his mother that he is taking acting lessons. Because in her reality there is no place for such dreams, and Mara is not fond of talk about theatre. When Felipe is invited to an audition and is confronted with family secrets and deceptions, the lines between dream and reality, truth and lies, dramas and real life become increasing blurred.
Moritz arrives in Berlin with no particular plans. He might study art history, but there is no rush, he is only 22. He has moved here to be with his boyfriend Jonas, an attractive photographer who is a little more accustomed to the easy-going, noncommittal ways of the city. But then their relationship suddenly comes to an end. Devastated and alone, Moritz becomes a seeker. His first foray takes him to a gym. Little by little his fashion, his friends and his drugs start to change. His life becomes more and more nocturnal, and he begins to liveout his repressed desires. With a documentary-like sensibility, Hannes Hirsch’s feature-length debut sensitively depicts a new start in Berlin’s gay scene. Bodyimages and notions of masculinity are constantly being negotiated, sexual constellations and identities are changing, and insecurities are sedated with the intoxicating rush of the next encounter. But Moritz’s vulnerability is always discernible. In this way, Drifter looks beneath the seductive surface of a night culture that knows no bounds and its short-lived games, revealing the actual people rather than celebrating the cliché.
With his performances as Aphrodite Banks, Jules has a place among London’s celebrated drag artists. One night after a show, he steps out to get some cigarettes and is brutally attacked by a guy out with a gang of blokes. Although Jules is able to recover physically, he withdraws from the outside world, traumatised. Months later, he recognises his attacker by chance in a gay sauna. Without make-up and wrapped only in a towel, Jules is able to approach the other man incognito and find out who he is. He begins an affair with the closeted homosexual Preston in order to take his revenge. Directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping deploy a direct style and tightly woven scenes to depict a London of stark contrasts interms of gender ideology. Carried by their cast’s physically and psychologically subtle performances, their revenge drama is gripping, but more importantly it is also the study of a milieu that avoids social determinism. A compelling psychological portrait of internalised homophobia and a powerful and brave pro-LGBTIQ+ kick against a society that, at its core, is totalitarian, anti-gay and anti-trans.
They meet at the airport in Seoul and could not be more different: Chinese immigrant Jin Xia works at the security checkpoint, dresses practically, and does her duty. The green-haired woman who shows up that day is younger, more extroverted and unimpressed by the pat-down. Xia is fascinated. When the young woman involves her in her crooked dealings shortly afterwards, it becomes clear that the two have more in common than meets the eye. On the lookout for the big hit that could free them from all their dependencies, they venture into South Korea’s underworld where they hold their own against the men who seek to dominate, possess and use them. In her second feature-length film, Han Shuai brings together two disparate lone female fighters who have learned to rely on no one but themselves. As they enter into a reluctant dance of getting-to-know each other – sometimes attracting, at other times repelling, sometimes drawing closer, at other times turning away – their plan recedes into the background. The cocoon that is spun around the twoof them and binds them together as they race through the city at night on their mopeds seems fragile, but inevitable.
Ralphie is young and healthy and his girlfriend is pregnant. Yet things do not feel quite right. His job as an Uber driver is neither gratifying nor financially secure. His relationship with his body may also be built on shaky foundations. When he is inducted into a libertarian masculinity cult, the tensions that have been growing inside him surface. Ralphie begins to lose his grip on reality. In his previous film, The Wound, South African filmmaker John Trengove explored how a male rite of passage unleashed repressed feelings with the same potential for danger as opening a pressure cooker. A similar force is at work inside the protagonist of Manodrome, in whom Trengove observes a disturbing phenomenon from an original angle. Ralphie is not the stereotype that springs to mind when thinking of groups formed around fervent misogyny such as the infamous “incels”, and his character helps us to deepen our understanding of what male fragility can entail. In spite of the dark implications of its premise, this film is not devoid of humour. However, the skilful way in which the tension builds and powerful performances from Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody leave the viewer truly shaken.
Film still Maynila: Sa mga kuko ng liwanag | Manila in the Claws of Light | Manila, Courtesy The Film Foundation / World Cinema Project
Fisherman Julio leaves his idyllic island province to search for his girlfriend Ligaya in Manila, where she allegedly has a job. He signs up at a construction site, where the workers are ruthlessly exploited. One day at the market, he spots the woman who lured Ligaya to the big city. She takes him to the house of a Chinese man, where Julio thinks he recognises his girlfriend at a window. When he loses both his job and his apartment, he ends up with a street hustler, who indoctrinates him into the world of prostitution. It becomes increasingly clear that Ligaya is also working as a prostitute, albeit not voluntarily … This social drama depicts the ordeals of two young people as representatives of the urban underclass during the Marcos regime, whereby the real location is freighted with symbolic meaning. Oppression and state corruption in Manila in the Claws of Light are countered by gestures of solidarity among the poorest of the poor. But neither religious solace nor the Marxist revolution will provide salvation for the two lovers, seen finally in a cinema, hugging as the passion of the Christ in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961) unfolds.
Iman lives with his wife Maryam and his two daughters in Sweden in an ever-changing succession of refugee hostels. Having fled his former Iranian homeland for fear of persecution, he is looking for ways to secure residence for them, and is earning extra money delivering pizzas on a snowmobile. When Maryam unexpectedly falls pregnant with a third child, and conversations with the authorities become more difficult, Iman decides to resume his career as a wrestler. Although he has promised Maryam to put the whole thing behind him, he is hoping that this will help him obtain a special residence permit as a sportsman. His skills quickly return and are appreciated in the Swedish team, but his life away from his family is not without consequences. Communication breaks down between him and his wife, who sees no reason to stay in Sweden any longer, and he is confronted with the deeper reasons for his flight. Iranian director Milad Alami’s second feature depicts an emotional as well as physical confrontation with the unspoken. With an engaging cast led by Payman Maadi, this meticulously rendered drama reveals how complex social dynamics can affect an individual’s inner self.
After transitioning, it seemed easier for Feña to simply cut all ties with his past. Dealing with the changes was painful enough, let alonehis family’s reaction. But when Feña runs into an ex-boyfriend, receives an unexpected visit from his little sister and finds his Chileanfather trying to reconnect with him, their lives are suddenly once again intertwined. Compassionate, intimate and frank, Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s debut feature film explores the complex challenge of being trans and trying to reconcile the past with the present.
In the 1970s, an Iranian student named Zahra meets a fellow student called Maria at university in Bucharest. They are both pursuing a degree in medicine and develop a deep friendship and admiration for each other. When the revolution against the Shah breaks out in 1979, Zahra goes back to Iran, moved by the hope of political transformation, although disappointments are quick to follow. Zahra never ends up returning to Romania. Over the next decades, Zahra and Maria exchange letters about protests, the general upheaval in both countries, the oppression of women and how it affects them; Romania is not to remain untouched by revolution either. Separated by the revolutions, their correspondence depicts two women struggling to conform to societal stereotypes and grappling with their profound feelings for each other, which seem to stretch beyond simple friendship. In his film, Vlad Petri draws entirely on incredible, stunningly edited archival footage from Iran and Romania to tell the story of these two women in such a way that the lines between documentary and fiction blur. In such testing times, doesn’t such a bond almost seem too good to be true?
