Archive

Off Beat

When it’s cold – breathe. It’s November and 26-year-old Lukas is not so much living as floating. His dream of making it as a musician is on the wane and his great passion – rap – has also past its heyday. Lukas lives with his producer, 46-year-old Mischa, in an old loft where they cultivate cannabis. They have been having a turbulent affair for years – but this is a closely guarded secret. Lukas has grown cold inside and only really feels himself...

Olhe pra mim de novo

OLHE PRA MIM DE NOVO is a road movie that whisks us away to the wild, semi-arid expanse of north-eastern Brazil. Our tough, cool travelling companion is Silvyo Luccio (‘..I was born a woman, became a lesbian and am now a man’), a thinker in the throes of transition and transformation who finds himself on a journey back into his religious-fundamentalist, deeply prejudiced, traditionalist past. At the heart of old wounds, humiliation and trauma lie...

Omaret Yacoubian

The Yacoubian Building in Cairo is still an eye-catching construction. Built in 1934 and named after the leader of the Armenian community, it was long regarded as the last word in comfort and elegance. Loosely based on a highly popular novel by Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswani, this film portrays episodes in the lives of the people who live here. One of the building’s inhabitants is the aristocratic Zaki El Dessouki. A playboy for whom women are st...

Onde o Verão Vai (episódios da juventude)

The summer heat shimmers. A group of friends drives to the forest. Their bodies are packed tightly into the car, four on the backseat and two up front. The men kiss. In the woods they happen upon a snake. The snake coils itself around the young man’s foot. The girl holds it in her hands. Two men eat peaches. After the kiss, the day is over. The composition of the group in a picture frame recalls the early films of Asghar Farhadi, in which time an...

One Big Bag

A millennial death doula introduces us to the world of end-of-life care. With a matter-of-fact demeanor and intense physicality, she guides us into the largely uncharted waters of corpse care—practical, political, and spiritual. She performs her knowledge within a field of props that are the tools of her trade, kept in a “mobile corpse kit”—everyday items that she manipulates to profound use. The film, drawn from workshops, research, and inte...

One Hand On Open

In an institute for violence studies, Tracey Niles struggles to reconnect with her lost memory. She is haunted by a silhouette. The image of a perpetrator? To whom she fell victim? The current institute director, Reena Chandrakali, is leading a "self-defense against hate violence" campaign for the distribution of firearms throughout "sexual minority" communities. Faith Eatherton is developing a philosophical treatise: "Dissipated: Reaching for th...

Onthakan

Tam, a timid loner, is bullied regularly by his fellow pupils at school. He is met with similar rejection and suspicion within the narrow confines of his parents’ dingy home, where his father beats him. One day Tam arranges online to meet Phum at a derelict swimming pool. They are both looking for sex, but their encounter leaves them with a feeling of comfort and security. A close bond develops between the two boys and, before long, they are roam...

Opaque

Two performers, members of an underground organization, a curtain, and pink smoke inside the remnants of an old public swimming pool. Do the curtains and fumes grant the "right to opacity" (Edouard Glissant) to the bodies that they mask and disguise?
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They produce installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films capture performan...

Open

The young hermaphrodite Cynthia (Gaea Gaddy) meets Gen (Tempest Crane) and Jay (Jendeen Forberg), a couple recovering from plastic surgery. She learns of Pandrogony, in which two people merge their facial features making one unified entity from separate ones. Inspired by this, Cynthia abandons her husband and suburban life to embark on a road trip with Gen through the remnants of 20th century America. Simultaneously, a young transman meets a young ...

Orchard Street

Presented for the first time in the originally planned half-hour cut: Avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs' first foray into the world of cinema – a document of the vibrant Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan where Jacobs grew up.

Orlando, ma biographie politique

Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” tells the story of a young man who grows up to become a 36-year-old woman. Almost a century after its publication, Paul B. Preciado speaks to Virginia Woolf to tell her that her fictional character has become a reality. The transition of Orlando’s body now lies at the root of all non-binary bodies and there are Orlandos all over the world. Through the authentic voices of other young bodies undergoing metamorphosis, Prec...

Orly

Winter’s end, travelers are waiting in Paris airport Orly. A woman, who accidentally left her wedding ring at her mother’s, falls in love with a stranger. A young man lost his love in the much too close relationship that he has with his girlfriend (Lina Falkner), and discovers the woman of his dreams. At the cusp of adulthood, a beautiful youth is traveling with his mother. For the son, it’s time to speak plainly. He tells her the story of him an...

Os famosos e os duendes da morte

Mr Tambourine Man is the name adopted by a sixteen-year-old boy living in a Brazilian village who is a great Bob Dylan fan. His taste in music, his style and his habits make him an outsider at school. He publishes gloomy texts on his blog, smokes grass and, together with his only friend, Diego, dreams of one day seeing Bob Dylan live. Mr Tambourine Man lives in a world of his own. He’s always looking at images of the same girl on his computer, ima...

Otto; or, up with Dead People

A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn, who begins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera.
Meanwhile, Medea is trying to fini...

Out in Ost-Berlin - Lesben und Schwule in der DDR

Unlike the Federal Republic, by 1968 homosexuality was already de-criminalised in the German Democratic Republic’s penal code. But the ‘workers’ and farmers’ state' did not exactly welcome its gay and lesbian citizens with open arms; their sexuality was taboo and they were often marginalised from public life. The ‘bewitched’ generation that had seen the war and were now trying to live lives of inconspicuous normality felt threatened by younge...

P(l)ain Truth

P(L)AIN TRUTH tells the story of a transsexual's transformation from a biological woman into a biological man. Using poignant imagery, text and music, the film describes the range of emotions that she goes through during the different stages of the painful transformation.
A symbolic documentary, which comments on the relationships between gender, sexuality and biology, traversing between the realms of memory, fiction and reality. (Under Const...

Panteres

Scarred, fat, pregnant, shaved, tattooed: Joana examines the bodies of the women in the changing room. Later, she studies her own reflection in the mirror with the same intensity. Can you change your body? Your gender? Femininity? “Break free”, screams the caption on her T-shirt, under an image of Freddie Mercury – and Joana wants to break free of everything and everyone: from her girlfriend Nina‘s bad mood to the other girls at school. ...

Papilio Buddha

We could be in paradise: Shankaran discovers a rare butterfly, the Papilio Buddha, which is only found in the Western Ghats in India. It is a near perfect moment for him and his gay friend, Jack. The American lepidopterist accompanies Shankaran home where he witnesses an argument between Shankaran and his father which he fails to understand – and not just because they are speaking Malayalam. His father is the leader of a group of Dalits, or low c...

Para Aduma

'How do you feel about intimate relations? Speak freely, don’t hold back.’ · ‘I think it’s the highest connection between two souls.’ Benny’s hair is as red as the fur of her devout father’s treasured calf – which he believes will bring salvation. But the 17-year-old feels as lonely and trapped as the calf in its enclosure. Benny’s mother died giving birth to her, and she grew up alone with her caring yet patriarchal father. He is a figure o...

Parada

Turning transgression into a comedic principle, this turbulent farce that toys with clichés and stereotypes turned out to be an unexpected hit in Serbia and other ex-Yugoslavian countries. In PARADA a life-saving operation on a gangster’s pitbull terrier brings together two very different worlds: old school machismo meets gay obsession for interior design, homophobia meets overblown gender display as a number of former foes – Serbs, Bosnian Muslim...