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Heosuabideuleui ddang

Some landscapes have been abused to such a degree that they make their inhabitants strange and lonely. Honghae in rural South Korea has this effect on Ji-Young, a female installation artist who feels like and wants to be a man. She, at any rate, blames her secret transgender existence on the wasteland where she grew up when she returns there from the Philippines with the shy young Rain. The two met each other at an agency specialized in procurin...

Heute oder morgen

Summer in Berlin. Two Berliners, Maria and Niels, and one British student, Chloë, are three twenty-somethings. Drifting libidinously through Berlin, they plunge headlong into a carefree and chaotic love affair with each other. Boisterously living life to the full, they grasp everything and anything they please. Their only compass seems to be the pleasure they experience together – which works perfectly well until Chloë unintentionally falls preg...

High Fantasy

'I'm not trying to escape who I am. This is it, I was born in this body and I can’t escape it, no. Am I angry at what it is? Yes.’ An innocuous idea, since you can assume it would never actually happen: finding yourself in someone else’s body. Yet that is exactly what befalls Lexi and her friends during a camping trip. The shock is immense, especially given the friction that had already existed before the inexplicable event: not only bet...

Hoi Maya

Two elderly ladies meet unexpectedly at a hairdressing salon one day. Maya recognises Charlotte, and Charlotte recognises Maya. But Maya pretends she doesn’t know Charlotte. Their unexpected meeting reawakens memories of their youth together and the two women find themselves confronted with a story from way back in their past, of which they’d rather not be reminded...
About the film
70-year-old Charlotte (Heidi Diggelmann) has been a regular at C...

Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho

Giovana is Leo’s best friend. They spend their afternoons at the pool, awarding points for the level of their boredom and just hanging out. But there are limits to their intimacy. Leo is rather self-contained; even his schoolmates’ barbs can’t cause his sense of his own independence to waver. Tired of his parents’ over-protective attitude, this blind fifteen-year-old decides to determine his own life and applies for a school exchange. The arrival...

Hojoom

Eternal darkness seems to shroud the stadium where men with bizarre tattoos pursue a sport that is never shown or named. A body has been found here, and the police have already identified a guilty party. Now the circumstances of the crime are to be reconstructed, so that the case can be quickly shelved. However, the real killer and his teammates want to use the reconstruction to commit another crime. The twin sister of the victim, who is said to ...

Home When You Return

A double exposure, a portrait of a body, a house that oscillates between its narrative past and its literal presence. The melodramatic, 1950s films of amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin are psychically projected onto the house in which my grandmother raised seven kids as it is cleaned out and put up for sale after she passed away. Upholding the narrative structures of melodrama that often center around men, even when the films are about women, the film asks the viewer, as Thurber says in her introduction, to pay attention to the peripheries. (Carl Elsaesser) 
 

homo@lv

Gay Pride parades have long since become a fixture in many cities. Things are very different in the Latvian capital of Riga, where activists did not succeed in organizing the first gay pride parade until 2005. From the very beginning, the Latvian LGBT event was accompanied by official bans and violent counter-demonstrations on the one hand, and international solidarity on the other. In HOMO@LV, Latvian filmmaker Kaspars Goba looks back on the past ...

Horst Buchholz ... Mein Papa

My father was somebody who did not enjoy talking about himself. Although many a star of his generation has written an autobiography, he never felt inclined to do so. In order to encourage him to talk about his life, I decided to interview him. From 2001 until his death in March 2004, we recorded several hours of conversations during which he opened up to me as he had never done before. This material provided the basis for this documentary. My fat...

Hot Boy Nổi Loạn và Câu Chuyện về Thằng Cười, Cô Gái Điếm và Con Vịt

Saigon can be a very cold place. And yet this pulsating urbane megacity spells hope and desire for Khoi, who has escaped from his rural background. This is the place where this twenty-year-old embarks on a classic journey of initiation from innocence to experience and maturity. His search for somewhere to live brings him in contact with Dong, a smooth operator who agrees to take him in. At Dong’s apartment Khoi meets Dong’s boyfriend, Lam. The t...

House of Shame - Chantal All Night Long

Chantal is the manager, hostess and stage-hogging front woman of ‘House of Shame'-Party. In this documentary, filmmaker Johanna Jackie Baier tells her story. It begins with Chantal’s escape to Berlin from the confines of a small country town in southwest Germany in the autumn of 1980. Interweaving interviews and portraits, but also on- and off-stage stories, backstage gossip, copious amounts of music and excerpts from her shows, the film allow...

How Are You

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are a Danish-Norwegian couple, both artists, who have been working together since 1995 and have had a joint studio in Berlin since 1997. Michael Elmgreen was born in Copenhagen in 1961 and Ingar Dragset was born in Trondheimin Norway in 1968. The couple’s work is shown internationally; in Germany they gained a name for themselves for the memorial in memory of homosexual victims of the Nazi regime that was unveile...

How to Win At Checkers (Every Time)

The poor outlying districts of Bangkok are a world where you grow up very quickly. After both their parents die, eleven-year-old Oat, his little sister and his older brother Ek move in with their aunt. Ek works in a bar for male prostitutes and transvestites. His relationship with Jai, the son of rich parents, began when he was still at school. Their uneven love for one another is put to the test when the day of the annual conscription arrives; t...

Howl

In 1957 an American masterpiece was tried before a court of law. Standing trial was the poem ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg, which he recited for the first time in public at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Two years later, the poem appeared in print, published by City Light Books, a publishing house owned by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The tiny print run of 520 copies was subsequently seized by the police and Ferlinghetti found h...

Huhwaehaji Anah

In his feature film debut Korean director Leesong Hee-il tells the story of a gay love affair that draws as much inspiration from the modern melodramas of Asian queer cinema as it does from the social realism of Charles Dickens' novels. Su-min has grown up at an orphanage in the country. When he comes to Seoul to study design he encounters a world that is completely alien to him. At first he finds a job at a factory, only to lose it swiftly ...

Huling Palabas

In the summer of 2001, 16-year-old Andoy searches for his long-lost father in the most unlikely of places: on VHS tapes. When two movie-like characters appear in his small hometown, his reality begins to falter.

Hummingbirds

“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 their youth 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 seem...

I Am Michael

San Francisco in 1998. Queer activist Michael is passionately committed to supporting gay and lesbian youths. His own deep longing to belong means that he is tirelessly engaged in redefining his own existence, absorbing with apparent ease young Tyler into his long-term relationship with his friend Bennett. The trio decides to travel America to record on film the lives of gay teenagers. They subsequently manage to raise the cash to launch Michael’...

I Am Not Your Negro

In June 1979 renowned US writer James Baldwin began work on his last, unfinished text ‘Remember this House’. His personal memories of his three murdered civil rights friends Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King and his reflections on his own painful experiences as a black American serve to re-write American history.
Raoul Peck has turned these thirty hitherto unpublished pages into a powerful collage of archive photographs, excerpts fro...

I Don't Want To Be Just A Memory

Berlin queer community members mourn the substance abuse-related loss of their friends by sharing memories and rituals. Resembling glow-in-the-dark fungi, they radiate light together as a network of support and care.