Films A to Z

A young couple celebrates their first wedding anniversary. Having both prepared surprises for each other, they crack open a bottle of champagne and, proudly showing each other their wedding rings, they look back on their relationship. With musical accompaniment from Frida Selander, they ponder such questions as marital rows, quarrels with their peers, the desire for children, and their daily lives “B TEME”.

Frede accompanies her big sister to a queer party in the hope of winning back her ex-girlfriend. Labelled by the older girls as Babydyke, all she can do is take the plunge: Chin up and stay cool. This film describes the broad palette of interpersonal emotions with great sensitivity and dramatic intensity. In a rhythm of light and shadow, the gulf closes between own desires and the expectations of others.

Interior, Day. Matt and Isabel lie in bed, naked. They have sex. She sits on top of him; they surrender to one another passionately. Joanna, the flatmate, enters the room and sits on the corner of the bed, close to them. Isabel and her boyfriend continue undeterred. Matt (after a while, without glancing sideways): What is she doing here?Joanna: "I can’t sleep."Isabel (without stopping having sex): "Were we too loud?"Joanna (without moving to leave): "No." Bad [...]

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 were [...]

Won-Gyu is a flight attendant and is constantly in transit. Anonymous hotel rooms are all the home he knows. Tae-Jun is a motorbike courier who spends almost all his time on the streets. Two men with two jobs that keep them on the move. Two lives that are just a series of fleeting moments. Having clicked on the internet they arrange to meet in Seoul. But they only have a few hours. Won-Gyu never wanted to return to the city because Seoul reminds him of an event that has left him sad and angry. [...]

Tina doesn’t know much about the schoolgirl in the Hijab. She might come from Egypt or Iraq – but what does it matter? She would like to be there for her neighbour, protect her from her tough life at home and in the hood but how comes Tina thinks she knows so much about this foreign girl? Dana starts wondering why the blond girl has been paying her so much attention of late. Prejudice and tentative advances collide head-on in the block.

In 1995 BALLOT MEASURE 9 shocked movie-goers with its inside views of a divisive gay-rights battle and with the unprecedented violence the campaign rhetoric provoked across the state of Oregon - such that local activists, risking their lives, were given full-time police protection, slept with guns under their beds, and on election night wore bullet proof vests. Families were torn apart, neighbor set against neighbor. Director Heather Lyn MacDonald ducks behind the headlines to bare [...]

Bambi was born Jean-Pierre Pruvot in a tiny Algerian village in 1935. Even as a child,she refused to meet the expectations of her extended family, choosing instead to find a way to become the woman she always knew herself to be. A Cabaret Carrousel de Paris performance in Algiers in the 1950s proved to be all the encouragement she needed to emigrate to the French capital, assume the stage name of ‘Bambi’ and lead the life she longed for on the music-hall stages. Jean-Pierre, known [...]

Using interviews and archive material, the film reconstructs a bank raid which may not have gone down in history, yet has made film history - due to Sidney Lumet 's psychological drama DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975), in which Al Pacino plays the desperate and luckless bank robber Sonny Wortzik. Lumet's suspenseful thriller is based on a true story; his protagonist is modeled on a man whose real name is John Wojtowicz , On a hot August afternoon in 1972, Wojtowicz rushes into a Brooklyn branch [...]

A glance leads to a smile, a smile to a rendezvous: every love story begins the same way. These narratives are stored in songs and poems and live on beyond their inevitable endings, as Shakespeare’s titular sonnet 18 also suggests. In Mohammad Shawky Hassan’s metafictional essay, a female narrator who wishes to tell the story of a love between two men encounters a polyamorous chorus of lovers, and this oft-told tale is multiplied. In Club Scheherazade, there is no protagonist, [...]

A hospital in the middle of Tehran. The waiting room is full of mostly young people, drawn there by their desperation. They can't live out their love and desire and so they want to alter their gender. In the Islamic Republic of Iran homosexuality is punishable by death, while the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced transsexuality legal twenty years ago. Around 450 sex changes are performed each year in Iran. The film follows a group of people shortly before the difficult intervention. A tomboyish [...]

Maya refuses to believe that her relationship with Tamar is over. Instead, she tries everything in her power to prevent Tamar from leaving the country.

Few shone as brightly in the 1960/70’s, as the transgender pioneer Candy Darling. Andy Warhol discovered her and cast her in his films; Lou Reed wrote two songs ("Candy Says" & "Walk On The Wildside") about her and Tennessee Williams wrote her a starring role in one of his plays ("Small Craft Warnings"). Interwoven with Candy’s story is the story of Candy’s dear friend Jeremiah Newton, who kept her belongings and her cremated remains [...]

New York City’s Stonewall Inn is regarded by many as the site of gay and lesbian liberation since it was at this bar that drag queens fought back against police June 27-28, 1969. This documentary uses extensive archival film. The legendary film from Greta Schiller reveals a lot which is missing from Roland Emmerich's Stonewall - but nevertheless agrees with him in quite a few details. The world "before Stonewall", the beginning of the post-war gay rights movement: the German [...]

Having been good friends for years, Martin and Tomaz now find themselves on the cusp of adulthood. Martin’s father sends his son to southern Brazil, where the family is from, to sort out an inheritance matter. Tomaz accompanies him there. For both of them, the brief excursion to the coastal town becomes a journey into themselves. It’s not just the sea that nearly reaches the doors of the country house which exerts a slow, yet relentless pull on them – the two friends have the [...]

‘What's the right way to live? Some days I feel like I know, but I really don't know for sure. I just know that when bad things happen, good things happen too.’ Korea, 1994. The South is in the grips of FIFA World Cup fever, while the North mourns its newly deceased dictator. Eunhee registers all of this only in passing. Drifting through her days in Seoul, the eighth-grader feels like an outsider everywhere: at school, where her classmates bore her even more than the schoolwork, [...]

Fourteen-year-old Balli is something of a misfit. He lives with his drug-addicted mother in a squalid house and is bullied by his classmates. A stepfather who “thought the gun wasn’t loaded” has left him with a glass eye. But then Balli meets three boys of his own age – Addi, Konni and Siggi – and a friendship gently develops. For the first time in his life, Balli finds that he is able to connect, especially with Addi, whose mother believes in “the [...]

Detlef Gumm and Hans-Georg Ullrich began working on their long-term observational documentary BERLIN – ECKE BUNDESPLATZ twenty-four years ago. Their plan was to make a series of short and longer films documenting the fortunes of several inhabitants of an ordinary Berlin neighbourhood as they moved towards the year 2000. The protagonists were a typical cross-section of people living an old quarter of West-Berlin, and so, in their film, widows, a high-flying lawyer, drop-outs, owners of small [...]

Francis has survived his escape from North Africa. When he wakes up on a beach in the south of Europe, he is determined to live a regular, decent life from now on. But he winds up in present-day Berlin where a stateless person without a work permit is treated just as mercilessly as the labourer Franz Biberkopf in Döblin’s classic novel of German modernism. Francis initially resists an offer to deal drugs in Hasenheide park, but then comes under the influence of Reinhold, his neurotic, [...]

Friday afternoon in a park in Jerusalem. Shabbat is about to begin and people are making their final preparations. The park is almost empty – apart from the gay cruising scene. A young man, Oren, needs to make a phone call, but he hasn’t got a mobile with him. He addresses a passing orthodox Jew but isn’t sure if the man has even understood him. But the cleric is after something else entirely. Oren acquiesces,caught between curiosity and fear, desire and danger. Then his lover [...]

She was afraid to come out of the locker  She was as nervous as she could be  She was afraid to come out of the locker  She was afraid that somebody would see  (Two, three, four, tell the people what she wore)  It was an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini  That she wore for the first time today… An animated musical, BIKINI stars a young man, dolled up in his mother's yellow swim suit, who is afraid to come out of the [...]

Three women/three sisters/three professional luchadoras, part of the Dynasty Moreno: Rossy, Esther and Cynthia are competitive wrestlers on the ring. But they also bring lucha libre into life, wrestling with knives, pig heads, flowers and feathers!

Li Qi is working for a dolphin show, his friend Ren Yu chugs along with his mobile karaoke, working the surfers’ beach along the coast of Hainan Island where they both live. The tourists are delighted by Ren’s physical similarity to the screen actor Leslie Cheung and are happy to pay for a photo with him – or to get drunk with him. When a young woman joins this polyamorous couple, things are no different at first and an open, three-way relationship would seem possible. Together, [...]

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. Or [...]

Linn da Quebrada is a black transwoman from impoverished periurban São Paulo; she is also a pop performer who raises her voice for queers of colour from the favelas. Accompanied by her childhood friend and partner in crime, black transwoman and singer Jup do Bairro, her concerts are nothing short of dazzling. Aided by exorbitant costumes and plenty of twerking, her performances are onslaughts of electro against Brazil’s white heteronormative gender order and the machismo of the country’s [...]

Maurice, a reticent young homeless man somehow manages to get by in Brooklyn; he spends his nights in parked cars until he finds himself at ‘Bizarre’, an underground club renowned for its burlesque shows. Maurice is fascinated by the club’s playful revues celebrating self-determined sexuality and creative otherness, and the two female club owners both adore him. He soon becomes a part of their chosen family, and begins to bond with introverted Luka. But Maurice [...]

Ender and Çetin – both in their late thirties – have been friends since they were at school together. Çetin has been away for many years. Now he has returned to Ankara and has moved in with Ender, just as the friends always imagined they would. Their best friend, Fikret, who lives in Germany and is spending his holiday in Turkey, is involved in a traffic accident which kills both his parents and leaves him injured. When the time comes for him to return to Germany, he [...]

Sister Superior Clodagh and four other Anglican nuns are sent to open a school and clinic deep in the Himalayas. Physically and emotionally overwhelmed by the situation, Sister Clodagh starts reliving a romance from her pre-vow days, while Sister Ruth succumbs to erotic fantasies about local Brit Mr. Dean. When he rejects the lovesick nun's advances, Ruth turns her rage on Clodagh… This film from the Archers production company was shot in England, almost entirely on [...]

Looking like a rediscovered film reel from the early days of cinema and with its “animal drag” costumes, this Dadaist nature documentary imagines a utopia where any and all life forms are equal. Fabulous creatures that defy the binary classification of male and female and the division between human and animal go through the classic cycle of birth, courtship, reproduction, parental care and predatory behaviour.

His T-shirt caked with mortar, Alex takes a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. The other apprentices are laughing, throwing punches and showing off their fighting moves. They try to draw him into their game, but his thoughts seem elsewhere – not even his girlfriend can get through to him. Alex is searching for answers and he withdraws from the expectations of those around him. He eventually finds himself, at ease among a group of complete strangers.    [...]

Santiago, Chile, in 1986. Luchito is 13 years old and feels deeply attracted to Manuel, a 16-year-old neighbour. Luchito masturbates whilst watching the window of an adjacent building where Manuel is enjoying a sexual encounter with a neighbourhood girl. The window becomes an erotic stage that arouses Luchito’s curiosity – but this has catastrophic consequences for Manuel.

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Blood Below the Skin chronicles a week in the lives of three teenage girls who attend the same high school class. Coming from different social circles, the girls prepare for the most important night of their life – Prom Night. They have formed a dance group and rehearse the choreography. Two of the girls are drawn to one another and fall in love. The third is forced to take care of her distraught mother in the wake of her father’s disappearance. Each girl finds refuge [...]

In their films, the brothers Bill and Turner Ross often train their camera on simple people leading far from glamorous lives. In this film they find their protagonists in the shadow of the glitzy world of Las Vegas, in a bar called Roaring 20s, which is on the brink of closure. Always observing, but nonetheless in the thick of it, they accompany the last 24 hours in and around the bar, enabling the viewer to immerse themselves in a microcosm that might well be found in many places in the world [...]

Young men from all over the world have been meeting at the Blue Boy Bar in Berlin for forty years. According to their website, this is where the city’s lonely hearts, business people and tourists go. One after another, several young men take a seat at the bar, look into the camera and listen to themselves. A contract has been settled, the terms are read aloud. It allows the filmmaker to use the interviews as he sees fit. The men are paid for it. The men tell the filmmaker about their job, [...]

A lesbian spends a night with a straight woman. The next morning, she faces her unfulfilled expectations. Her thoughts relentlessly circle her desires and the indifference with which they are met. In an almost inexhaustible stream of consciousness that is simultaneously obsessive and tender, she relives the previous night which has gone nowhere; just like the streets and cul-de-sacs of San Francisco that seem to reflect her own mood in a deliberately laconic montage. Here, film historian [...]

Sixteen-year-old Axel has dropped out of school; he has no apprenticeship in sight and the relationship with his family, especially his stepfather, is deteriorating rapidly. Axel chooses to hang out with a gang of Neo-Nazis and skinheads, who become the friends he craves. But everything in life has its price. Led by the violent Lippi, the neo-Nazis attack a charitable soup kitchen. A series of unfortunate events lead to Axel stabbing to death Thomas Lorenz, the social worker in charge. On the [...]

There are 120,000 victims of Franco’s regime buried in the unmarked mass graves that stretch for kilometres alongside Spain’s country roads. One of these victims is the world-renowned Spanish author Federico García Lorca, who was shot and killed by the fascists during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. The mystery that surrounds the exact location of his remains has made him a symbol for those seeking to remember and disclose the hidden stories of gays and lesbians under [...]

Alfred has left northern France to look for his mother in Marseille. She works as a prostitute, and he changes his name to be near her.

Like everywhere else in the world, gays and lesbians in Cameroon also seek refuge in the city. The two young gay men in this film are crazy about Rihanna and Lady Gaga, who has been a gay icon since her hit song ‘Born this way’. But the tolerance Lady Gaga sings about is just a dream for these two young men. In their country, homosexual relations are subject to punishment of up to five years’ imprisonment, andit is almost impossible to come out to your own family. This film describes [...]

Helmer is 55 and a bachelor. He tends a remote farm and looks after his ailing father.Theirs is a brittle, tight-lipped relationship. When his father moves ever clother towards the grave, Helmer shifts him upstairs. He then clears out all the junk from the ground floor, throws the house plants on the dung heap, orders a new bed, and begins to live a life of his own. From time to time, Ada from the neighbouring farm drops in with her sons, and the milk truck driver regularly seeks Helmer’s [...]

Since 2017, #MeToo and the no-longer-covered-up abuse of countless women by Harvey Weinstein have called many things into question in the film industry. This documentary analysis of the male gaze in cinema is based on Nina Menkes’ lecture “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression”. In it, Menkes uncovers patriarchal narrative structures that lie behind supposedly classic set-ups and camera angles. Making use of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s [...]

Guy and his sister grow up on an island. His domineering mother keeps watch over everything from the tip of a lighthouse, his eccentric father experiments in the basement laboratory. Then there are the orphans, on whose heads the adoptive parents later find puzzling wounds. Another brother and sister pair is sent to the island: the Lightball Kids, two detectives that are meant to bring light into the darkness. The brothers and sisters are all yanked into the emotional roller coaster of first love, [...]

Praised by Jonas Mekas in 1970 as “propaganda for the politics of joy and disorder”, painter and writer Wynn Chamberlain 's BRAND X is back - finally! - to provide contemporary audiences with a strangely refreshing dose of late '60s countercultural humor and political satire. After a successful run throughout the USA in the early '70s, the only print of the film disappeared for almost 40 years before mysteriously resurfacing in its production company's vaults. The film, [...]

This film marks Neil Jordan 's second screen adaptation, after “ The Butcher Boy ”, of a novel by Patrick McCabe . In his book, the Irish writer describes a series of hilarious and drastic episodes in the (fictional) life of a young Irish transvestite named Patrick “Kitten” Braden, who gains something of a reputation working the streets around Piccadilly Circus in London in the 1970s , Patrick is born in 1958, in Tyreelin, close to the border with Northern Ireland. [...]

‘We’re all a bit odd’, says Pedro at some point in the presence of Daniela and Tania. They are about to reveal to someone else the content of their suitcase: a purple-coloured, child-sized alien with huge, dark eyes. The three friends, who are presently going through a phase of varying levels of disenchantment in their lives, have spent the last few days following a map left by Tania’s grandmother. She has just passed away; her last wish was that the alien be returned to [...]

Twin brothers Barry and Tom Howe live in the country – but their dream is to live the fast-and-loose lives of rock stars. Sooner than they ever dared hope, their dream comes true. Before long, they are much more than just a insider‘s tip for those in the know; in fact, they are soon regarded as the next big thing. Petulant managers, wily concert organisers, vitriolic journalists, groupies, sex, drugs and alcoholic excesses – Barry and Tom go through everything that true rock [...]

Vienna as a non-stop nocturnal land and doss house, the flip side of its daytime persona, devoid of schmaltzy waltzes and‘Mozartkugel’ chocolates. The protagonists of this documentary are young Bulgarian Romani who have wound up in Vienna due to poverty and the need to earn money for their families, and who are now offering their services at a hustler bar called ‘Rüdiger’ in the working class Margareten district. They wait, smoke, drink, play pool, dance, show off, [...]

When the second Intifada began, Israel closed its borders to workers from Palestinian territories who, during the previous years had taken on all the worst-paid jobs in the land. Just as in many industrialised countries, in Israel tasks such as housework or caring for the elderly are often delegated to foreign workers. Israel’s policy left a big hole in the job market, and so the Israeli authorities began to encourage workers from other parts of the world to emigrate to Israel to fill the [...]

New York in the summer of 1985. What we now know to be the AIDS crisis is approaching its first peak. The realisation is a shock, albeit at this stage only for those affected. It demands a complete rethink in the gay scene, which for the first time in history is functioning with a sense of equality and autonomy; moving away from radical hedonism towards a stronger awareness of the need to care for one another. David is looking after Robert, who is seven years older than him and is dying of AIDS. [...]

It’s monsoon season in Singapore during the Vietnam War. Bugis Street, the epicentre of multisexual nightlife and unchained libido, is where a band of hedonistic, transidentical poeple has taken root at the wacky love hotel SinSin. The lives of this crew of truly perverse, polymorph creatures are devoted exclusively to their dreams, beauty, desire and pleasure. Enter sixteen-year-old Lian, fresh from the country. She has come to this cheerfully hysterical madhouse to start work as a home [...]

‘Why are you always angry? Girls should be modest. Girls should behave well. You should be calm.’ In the atmospheric light of dusk and dawn, Rima Das portrays the lives of three friends on the threshold of adulthood. Poetic sensuality contrasts with authentic scenes of everyday life in their Indian village, where carefree youthfulness comes face to face with merciless reality. The story's protagonist is Bulbul, whose voice fails her when she has to sing in front of people. Fear [...]

The attempted suicide of his fiancée prompts a Japanese salary-man to read his family chronicles and look back at the life of his ancestors. They were samurai, the military nobility caste who carried out acts of violence at the behest of feudal lords, but suffered evenmore so under their cruelty, often forced into ritual suicide (seppuku). The women were under constant threat of kidnapping and rape,and the men subjected to arbitrary disfigurement and homosexual slavery... In a radical [...]