Films A to Z

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 sister, [...]

There’s a party in the Tokoriki nightclub. It’s Geanina’s 18th birthday and the whole village is there. The neon palm is lit up and the DJ is wearing his golden shirt. Alin and his friends ride up in style in the horse-drawn cart and take over the dance floor. But Alin seems to have something on his mind. His eyes sparkle when he sets eyes on Geanina, which doesn’t escape her boyfriend’s attention. Emotions are running high. Will there be an escalation tonight?

At a new school Leandro meets the lively Jefferson. They form an instant attachment and soon realise that theirs is no ordinary friendship. But Jefferson has to tell Leandro something and he is clearly struggling to get it out. Leandro enquires further, hoping it’s some kind of a joke. Except Jeff doesn’t look like he’s joking. If they want to be together there's one irreversible thing Leandro must deal with: Jeff is HIV positive.

In the latest of her series of portraits of legendary underground performers, Marie Losier takes us into the world of Fernando, aka Deborah Krystal, the glittering and poetic performer of the Lisbon club Finalmente. Over the last thirty years, Fernando has been performing every night at Finalmente, dressed in golden gowns. O Pássaro da Noite reveals the many skins of Fernando that lay underneath the layers of his colorful fabrics, and – with the help of a large cast of friends and [...]

Slowly and elegiacally, the camera glides at first over a forest shrouded in fog, then over a panorama of Rio de Janeiro. An off-screen voice tells us that Rio is a factory of dreams and nightmares, a city of transformations. In her essayistic film Obscuro Barroco Greek director Evangelia Kranioti explores the poetic words of her transgender narrator Luana Muniz, who is herself an icon of Brazil’s queer subculture. Amidst a somnambulistic tide of images she enters the pulsating world of [...]

Lara is Palestinian. She left Ramallah thirteen years ago to begin a new life in London where she married Michael and had a child. She, her husband and her seven-year-old son James lead a pleasant, albeit somewhat dispassionate life in one of the city’s better districts. But there’s nothing that a good slug of vodka won’t help her to cope with. But then, one day, Inam turns up at Lara’s front door. She is a childhood friend from Ramallah. No sooner does Inam surge [...]

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 in moments [...]

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 lies an anxiously awaited encounter with [...]

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 still his great weakness, the elderly man [...]

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 and again the individual is also faced with [...]

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 interviews conducted [...]

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 the Bodyless." Her discovery [...]

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 roaming the rubbish heaps [...]

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 performances in front of the camera, often [...]

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 punk, Nick (Daniel Luedtke), and they fall in [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 and his friend being at the river [...]

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, images in which a man also appears. In his daydreams [...]

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 finish “Up with Dead People,” the epic [...]

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 younger homosexuals [...]