Films 2023

Engl. Title: 20,000 Species of Bees
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 [...]

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Engl. Title: The Devil Queen
The Black gay “Devil’s Queen” (her real name is never mentioned) rules the underworld of Rio de Janeiro from the back room of a brothel. Her eyes thick with green eyeshadow, her gaze falls mercilessly upon the members of her drug cartel. The same jackknife can be used either to shave her legs or to slit open traitors. But her reign of terror is unstable; resistance is brewing. Soon, everyone is waging war against each other to replace the queen: the favela gangsters against [...]

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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 [...]

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Bambino has settled into his life as a single man. His delivery driver job in Lagos means that he has a steady income, even if the promised promotion is a long time coming. He is appreciated by the neighbourhood; he helps out financially where he can and is generous when people are late repaying him. His neighbour Ifeyinwa’s advances leave him cold, but when he meets the charismatic Bawa, the two immediately hit it off. A photo competition sees the two men driving around the city together [...]

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“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 to endure homophobic attacks on the streets, his parents temporarily move the family to the countryside. Away from the city, Nino wanders in a forest supposedly haunted by the Almamula, a monster that takes those who commit [...]

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Engl. Title: About Thirty
Buenos Aires in March 2020, just days before the outbreak of the pandemic. A wedding is being celebrated; a car overturns. The guests share joints, kisses, a blow job and the memory of a loss. At the centre of this comedy of errors is 30-year-old Arturo, played by director Martín Shanly. He is every bit as drawn to misfortune as he is directionless – qualities he shares with the remainder of the film’s characters. His faux pas and blunders stand in inverse relation to the [...]

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One day their paths cross again, by chance. Alice, now an internationally acclaimed cellist, has a series of performances at the concerthall where Jo works. A decade has passed since their year spent as scholarship students at an exclusive girls’ boarding school deep inthe 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 [...]

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Engl. Title: Till the End of the Night
Robert wears a leather jacket and his hair rather long. He is by no means your average cop – at least not the kind to be found in most German movies. As an undercover investigator, he is tasked with gaining the trust of a criminal, Victor, by faking a relationship with Leni who has been released on parole to play along. They manage to make contact with Victor at a dance class: Robert and Leni – he gay, she trans – make a great couple and soon have the criminal on the hook. [...]

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Doesn’t crush also mean “to smash”? Dealing with their own obsessive crushes, Ella Rocca researches what to do about it. During the quest for a representation of their feelings, texts, images and sounds are layered on top of each other on the computer screen and become the expression of intense contemplation. Internet discoveries and a moment of intimate directness merge to provide a sense of the inner workings of infatuation.  

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Engl. Title: I Woke Up With a Dream
“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 the meantime, 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Engl. Title: The Castle
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 [...]

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Engl. Title: Afraid Doesn't Exist
A German police state of the past is the setting for the pulsating short film thriller Es gibt keine Angst (Afraid Doesn’t Exist). In it, Anna Zett collages video and audio material from the Berlin Archive of the GDR Opposition, partially taking the perspective of a sensitive child. Based on her own intimate involvement, the artist traces a successful, yet mostly unknown act of resistance at the very end of the GDR, while at the same time opening up an associative space for connecting [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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“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 badtimes.” In Laredo, a city in southern Texas on the Mexican border, best friends Silvia and Beba know that the long summer nights of their teenage 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. [...]

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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 Martin Luther 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 [...]

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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? [...]

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Engl. Title: Between Revolutions
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, [...]

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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.

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Since her debut at the age of 18, musician, civil rights campaigner and activist Joan Baez has been on stage for over 60 years. For the now 82-year-old, the personal has always been political, and her friendship with Martin Luther King and her pacifism have shaped her commitment. In this biography that opens with her farewell tour, Baez takes stock in an unsparing fashion and confronts sometimes painful memories. She not only shares her successes but also speaks openly about long-standing psychological [...]

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Gil Boksoon leads a double life. She is both the mother of a teenage daughter, whom she is raising on her own, and a legendary professional killer at top-tier killing agency MK Ent. One could even say that she is better at killing people than raising them. But one day, either out of motherly instinct or simply because there are limits to what even the ruthless Boksoon is willing to do, she refuses to complete an assignment. In doing so, she herself becomes a target. In Kill Boksoon, director [...]

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Engl. Title: Bones and Names
“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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Engl. Title: The Beast in the Jungle
It begins at the end of the 1970s, amidst the glittering nights of a club as a place of endless (im)possibilities and the timeless clockwork of a city. This is where John and May are waiting for an extraordinary, all-changing moment to occur. Around them, everything is loud and in motion, while they hold out in silence. Twenty-five years pass as they follow world events on their cathode-ray tube television set: Mitterrand’s term in office, the AIDS crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, [...]

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Engl. Title: Long Long Kiss
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 sister and 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 [...]

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Engl. Title: The Lost Boys
“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 [...]

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Engl. Title: Calls from Moscow
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, advice services for immigrants, chats with the director, news reports, lip-synced pop renditions, [...]

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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 [...]

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One of the many virtues of Sebastian Mihilescu’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 eerie fertility rituals [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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Engl. Title: Dipped in Black
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. Itis how Anangu Tjukurpa (story connected to country / dreaming / myth / lore) have been passed [...]

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Engl. Title: Manila in the Claws of Light
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. [...]

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Engl. Title: Opponent
Iman liman 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 [...]

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“I'm fine with it.” – “Yeah, well, I am not.” After transitioning, it seemed easier for Feña to simply cut all ties with his past. Dealing with the changes was painful enough, let alone his family’s reaction. But when Feña runs into an ex-boyfriend, receives an unexpected visit from his little sister and finds his Chilean father trying to reconnect with him, their lives are suddenly once again intertwined. Compassionate, intimate and frank, [...]

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“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 [...]

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Engl. Title: Our Body
A teenager is sitting in the doctor’s consultation room, the camera films her from behind so that she remains anonymous. She tells the doctor how she got pregnant. Her boyfriend had assured her he would take care. Now she has to make a difficult decision. You can feel her anguish in every sentence she utters. And there’s no sign of the boyfriend.This is one of the the first scenes in Claire Simon’s impressive documentary Notre corps. With a gaze full of tenderness, the French [...]

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Engl. Title: Sleepless Nights
April 2022 in France. The presidential election is entering its final round and the atmosphere is tense. Solène, a waitress, drifts through the night. She takes drugs, hurts people’s feelings and increasingly loses her grip.

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Engl. Title: The Intrusion
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. The past reappears in various forms, challenging the protagonists, including Alê. Right there, in the riverbed where she used to play with her [...]

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Engl. Title: Orlando, My Political Biography
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, Preciado retraces the stages [...]

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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. A dance develops into a flirtation and then into a passionate night together. [...]

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Jonny is tough, fearless and forthright. She picks locks with ease and seems to be able to take care of herself pretty well. She also slips rent money into her single father’s pocket. Their relationship is fragile and yet strangely symbiotic. Feeling overstretched, her father decides to send Jonny to live with a distant aunt. But even in the care of the strict Hildie, the teenager cannot seem to find peace. On her 18th birthday, Jonny is given a cake baked according to a magical family [...]

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Revolver is an archive of pareidolia, a situation in which someone sees a pattern or an image of something that does not exist, narrated by a descendant of Exodusters, Black people from the southern United States who fled violence and inequities following the American Civil War of 1861–65. The city of Nicodemus in Kansas was deemed a refuge for Exodusters. Two contradicting narratives about this city are difficult to hold at once: the lure of a potential utopia while also being exiled [...]

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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 [...]

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Engl. Title: Sisi & I
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 [...]

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Engl. Title: The Shift
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.

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Engl. Title: Typhoon Club
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 [...]

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Talented conductor Lydia Tár has established herself in the male-dominated world of classical music. When she arrives in Berlin as the first woman appointed to conduct a major German orchestra, she is at the peak of her career. Between commitments and concerts on both sides of the Atlantic, she is preparing for a much anticipated recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. But a shadow suddenly falls over this charismatic figure; her performance on the podium suffers and her status begins [...]

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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. Longtracking 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 [...]

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Engl. Title: To Write from Memory
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 autonomyis met with incomprehension.

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In a Colombian prison in 2012, the left-wing intellectual FARC rebel Jaison and the hitherto apolitical trans former sex worker Laura fall in love. Their bond initially causes distrust within the FARC, but the charismatic Jaison is able to dispel such misgivings by calling for a common 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 [...]

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Engl. Title: A Very Long Gif
Recorded with a swallowed pill camera, the video Un gif larguísimo (A Very Long Gif) is an observational journey through the landscape of the digestive system, combined with a detailed zoom into cities and people moving in the limits of our vision, filmed with a powerful telephoto lens. These disparate image spaces sustain each other with the tension of celestial bodies. The sound of overlapping movements through different human agglomerations offers a third level of observation. Scales [...]

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Engl. Title: Living Bad
Five women are running an old hotel and trying to save it from inexorable decay. Guests arrive over the course of a weekend: a couple bears the wounds of a long-term misunderstanding; a domineering mother interferes in her daughter’s relationship; two girls try to save their own love story in the face of opposition from a possessive mother. Viver Mal is the reverse shot of Mal Viver, which is screening in the Competition: here, João Canijo reveals everything that was floating in [...]

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