Archive

Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith

In his essay film, Jerry Tartaglia, longtime archivist and restorer of the film estate of queer New York underground, experimental film, and performance legend Jack Smith, deals less with Smith’s life than with his work, analyzing Smith’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies in 21 thematic chapters. “Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith is a film essay about the artist’s work, rather than a documentary about his life. Therefore, it doe...

Espero tua (re)volta

Thousands of protestors are loudly chanting subversive slogans. The police react aggressively with teargas and truncheons. The experiences, passions and fears of these Brazilian teenagers are immediate, relevant and all-pervading. In 2015, they began occupying schools throughout the country, demanding education for all. Shot in the midst, using the activists’ own images, this film’s form perfectly matches the explosive expression of radical, dem...

Esquí

There’s a monster in the Nahuel Huapi Lake. In the twilight, it spreads itself out across the surface of the water like a taut cowhide, grasping at its victims with sharp claws. Another monster also lurks in the surroundings of the lake, which is close to Bariloche in the Argentine Andes. It is called Capa Negra: the Black Cape. It haunts the ski slopes by night and should be avoided at all costs.
Monsters from the legends of the Mapuche find th...

Estrellas de la línea

Valeria, Vilma and Mercy are prostitutes living in Guatemala. The price for their services is two dollars. All three belong to a group of women who work in the vicinity of “La Linea”, the railway line that cuts straight across Guatemala City and runs to the Pacific Ocean. All of them dream of being treated with respect, and that the violence against them will end. In order to publicise their plight – that also includes regular police harassment –...

Every Little Step

The 21st May, 1975, marked the Broadway premiere of Michael Bennett and Nicholas Dante’s musical “A Chorus Line”. When the curtain fell on stage for the last time on 28 April, 1990, the piece had been performed 6,137 times, breaking all records. To date it is the longest lasting Broadway American musical ever. On Broadway alone over six million people saw the piece that received a Pulitzer Prize and nine Tony awards. Richard Attenborough made a scre...

Evidentiary Bodies

A life lived within the sprocket holes of film can still dance. The beauty of the human body, although maimed, dances forward. Hope does not live eternal but daily. An audience immersed in three screens to feel the encasement of illness, the isolation of the material
body. The forever ongoing chain of film runs but cannot hold up the protagonist. Time is flexible as the body transforms and the film loops. A trilogy of the self, witness of decline and suffering, performing the unthinkable, inevitable, dance of death. Three surrounds,
enfolds, embraces the one who cannot stand alone. We, as human beings on a small globe, united by evolutionary structure and biological DNA have a chance to come together through the experience of empathy and identification with the sensitive body. An
unspoken plea for viewers to engage with compassion, to experience vulnerability, to know through evidence this body is their body.

Exhibition

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 suffraget...

Exposed

In her previous work, underground artist Beth B has often addressedsuch topics as sexual repression and boundary transgression. In EXPOSED, she leads us through New York’s 21st century undergroundwhere classic burlesque – usually catering to the male gaze –  is being radically redefined, prevalent sexual clichés are interrogated,and deeper meanings are teased out in a humorous and sometimes shocking way. From its founder James Habacker, we learn ...

Extractions

Extractions parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension industry. As the filmmaker reviews how these industries have affected her, she reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

Fabulous! The Story Of Queer Cinema

The pictorial depiction of gays and lesbians in American culture is a modern-day achievement – the result of gay and lesbian movements in the last third of the previous century. Up to that point, depictions of gay and lesbian life were considered taboo; and whenever they did appear, it was largely a question of stereotyping. Nowadays, queer images are to be found everywhere. Lisa Ades’ and Lesli Klainberg’s documentary describes how this change h...

False Belief

FALSE BELIEF is the love story of a couple caught up in the gentrification of a neighborhood that is wiping out a seminal African-American cultural legacy and displacing its original residents. In 2008 Norwegian artist and filmmaker Lene Berg moved in with her partner, a Black New York publisher, who will be referred to as D. After giving a statement to the police about being harassed by his neighbor in Harlem, D. was arrested, prosecuted, and i...

Fassbinder - lieben ohne zu fordern

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was probably Germany’s most significant post-war director. His swift and dramatic demise at the early age of 37 in 1982 left behind a vacuum in European filmmaking that has yet to be filled, as well as a body of unique, multi-layered and multifarious work of astonishing consistency and rigour. From 1969 onwards, Danish director and film historian Christian Braad Thomsen maintained a close yet respectfully distanced friendshi...

Fear of Disclosure

This was the first film to specifically address the difficulties in relationships between HIV-positive and HIV-negative men. Two go-go dancers assess each other’s mortality while the world rotates and a gay man reflects on the psychosocial consequences of the disclosure of his HIV infection. Video images caught in a loop of restless perseverance. A feverish attempt to make a film to battle the shock that the AIDS crisis presented to a vibrant se...

Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer

 

Felice chi é diverso

An older gay couple in a city in northern Italy talk about their decades-long relationship. A man describes how he was physically abused by his father because of his sexual identity. Another, who had a high-flying career, recounts a sexually fulfilled life and mentions numerous homosexual politicians. Gay men from across the social classes and regions of the country have their say and discuss the different conditions which determined gay life in ...

Female Misbehavior

In four short films, three women and a transgender man talk about their sexuality. In Bondage, Carol, a New York activist in the lesbian leather scene, explains her embrace of sadomasochism. Annie is a portrait of mousy Ellen Steinberg, AKA performance artist Annie Sprinkle, whose eccentric erotic shows give audiences, quite literally, insight into her anatomy. In eloquent and provocative dialogue, academic and social critic Camille Paglia talks...

Femme

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 appr...

Férfiakt

Although fiftyish Tibor is still attractive, his days as a successful screenwriter - if you could ever have called him that - are over. His wife was once a well-known actor and is still a beautiful woman. However, the only roles she gets nowadays are in provincial theatres. The couple's career prospects look bleak; their relationship has come to a dead end and only the fear of getting older forces them to keep up the appearance of a happy mar...

Feriado

In 1999, Ecuador’s banking system collapsed in the wake of a corruption scandal. These events provide the historical context for sixteen-year-old Juan Pablo’s enforced sojourn with his rich uncle and his family. Pensive Juan has absolutely no use for either this corrupt banker who has withdrawn to his refuge in the Andes, or his ignorant sons. One night he observes his uncle’s cronies brutally mishandling a man they discover tampering with their ...

Fieber

“Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood” (Pablo Neruda). It’s the early 1950s and little Franzi is growing up in the small Austrian town of Judenburg. Her oppressive family home is dominated by her feverish and mentally ill father, who is rigid and unpredictable. Her father, who regularly delivers halves of pork for the butcher, spent several years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Algeria and Syria – a period which he part...