Archive

Magi I Luften

Decked out in toreador bolero jackets, paper hats and parade uniforms, four young people dance and sing in a blaze of light and glitter. They are celebrating Teresa’s birthday – with drugs and music in full flow. It will be a long and turbulent night; a decisive night, too, because Teresa is sixteen and still a virgin. Tonight she’s determined to sleep with Stefan, but Stefan either won’t or can’t oblige. Even the red thigh boots Teresa breaks a ...

Making The Boys

Mart Crowley’s "The Boys in the Band" (1968) belongs to the seminal artistic works for the gay community. For the first time gay men were not presented as victims or pathetic losers, loners or as societal waste, but rather as people like you and I. Together with Mart Crowley, who leads the audience through fireworks of historical film snippets and interview bits, Crayton Robey traces the phenomenon of success and the protagonists of that time.
Nob...

Maladies

James, Catherine and Patricia. A house on the beach not far from New York. It is1978. A neighbour with a soft spot for James drops by from time to time. James with his big-checked jacket, his camera and his unfinished novel. Catherine with her paintings and her men’s suits. Patricia with her cigarettes. In his directorial debut, Carter has created a tender, associative film about the friendship of three misfits.James used to be a successful TV so...

Malambo, el hombre bueno

Dignified, strong and formidable, and oozing erotic attraction: young malambo dancer Gaspar is at one with his passion for dance that he has made his profession. But, as director Santiago Loza makes clear at the beginning of his film, the Argentinian competitive dance malambo is an uncompromising battle against time. This is a dance to which you devote your entire life and, even if you should happen to win the top championship joust, you are hen...

Mamma vet bäst

So, he’s gay. This evening he’s introduced his boyfriend to his mum and later kissed him passionately goodbye in the car. He’s fortunate to have such an open-minded mother – not everyone is as lucky. But she thinks it’s best that he doesn’t tell his father yet. And he certainly shouldn’t make it known in public that he’s gay. A lot of people are prejudiced. Not everyone is as understanding as his mother ...

Mammalia

One of the many virtues of Sebastian Mihăilescu’s startling first feature Mammalia is that you never know where he’s taking you. From one scene to another, the film is always unpredictable, even disconcerting. This is the same feeling Camil (István Téglás), a troubled young man, experiences. He feels diminished and insecure with the women around him, especially with his partner, who disappears to join a secret community of women dedicated to eeri...

Man for a Day

Gender activist Diane Torr’s worldwide appearances and workshops are now legendary. For the past thirty years, the focus of this performance artist’s work has been an exploration of the theoretical, artistic as well as the practical aspects of gender identity. Katarina Peters’ documentary observes a Diane Torr workshop in Berlin in which a group of open-minded women came together to discover the secrets of masculinity. What makes a man a man and ...

Mangosteen

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 h...

Männer Helden und schwule Nazis

Since its inception, the homosexual movement has always numbered gays whose political leanings tend towards the extreme right; these are men who set great store by masculinity and nationalism, who look down on ‘fairies’ and women and propagate anti-Semitism. Writing shortly before his death from Aids at the end of the 1980s, neo-Nazi Michael Kühnen claimed that gay men made better fighters, because having no family made them more independent and b...

Manodrome

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 filmma...

Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures

He was a catalyst and an illuminator, but also a magnet for scandal. From an early age Robert Mapplethorpe had but one goal which he single-mindedly pursued: to ‘make it’ not just as an artist but also as an art celebrity. He could not have picked a better time: it is the Manhattan of Warhol’s Factory, of Studio 54 and, following the Stonewall riots, an era of unbridled hedonistic sexuality. His first solo exhibition in 1976 already unveils his ...

Marble Ass

Merlin, a transvestite, and Sanela, a prostitute, share a home in the suburbs of Belgrade. Dzoni, who has returned from fighting on the Bosnian front gets to know them. A bit of sex is what he needs to overcome political violence and macho aggression.

Marilyn

There’s not much going on in this part of rural Argentina where a shy young man named Marcos lives with his family. Theirs is a modest existence, where gender roles are clearly demarcated. The hot summer doesn’t make life any easier, but money needs to be earned and the herd of cattle must be kept together. Marcos manages to carve out little islands of freedom during his routine; in these moments he likes to put make-up on his childlike face or ...

Mario Wirz

Six weeks before his death from cancer, poet Mario Wirz takes a walk with his friend Rosa von Praunheim during which he candidly shares his final thoughts on, among other things, the power of love and positive thinking: “Let’s live!”

Mariposa

A butterfly, a creature symbolising rebirth and a new beginning, epitomises Romina’s and Javier’s world, a world that consists of two parallel realities. In one of them they grow up as siblings who desire each other and try to give shape to their love without sexual fulfilment; in the other they are a young man and woman who form an awkward friendship instead of succumbing to their feelings for each other. Javier finds himself in a discordant rel...

Mars Exalté

A city at dawn. Traffic is flowing like red and white blood cells. A man sleeps, enveloped in the darkness – he is beautiful, he is naked, it is hot. We will never know what he is dreaming. The sun rises and the façades of the skyscrapers begin to sparkle 
 

Marungka tjalatjunu

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 ...

Masala Mama

Seng, the son of a »Ragman« comics collector, would like to draw comic book super heros, to the distress of his father. In order to learn, he picks up comic books. The day he steals one from a mom and pop store, he is caught by a police officer. The storekeeper helps Seng out of trouble, but trouble seldom comes alone: Seng’s father suddenly shows up at the Indian shop and sees his boy hanging around with the gay storekeeper. Seng has only one mo...

Mato seco em chamas

When the flare lights up the night sky, that is how they know the gasoline is ready for sale, the men on the motorbikes who collect the canisters from the fearless Chitara, her sister Léa and their all-female gang, the sample fuel still burning out on the ground. From the watchtower of their makeshift oil refinery, you can see the lights of Brasília in the distance, although Sol Nascente, one of the continent’s biggest favelas, is a world u...

Maurice

 
At King’s College, Cambridge in 1909, fellow students Maurice Hall and Clive Durham feel more for each other than mere friendship. But sexual contact, never mind the “unspeakable vice of the Greeks” as their Plato professor calls it, remains taboo. For fear of being ostracised, like one of their classmates, they keep their love secret. Later, after Clive has made a marriage befitting his station, they maintain a purely platonic friendship. Wh...