Films A to Z

Goca is a transvestite in Belgrade, the capital city of a country where organising orpartcipating in a gay pride parade is forbidden. She is raising a daughter who is really her niece. Although her eighteen-year-old boyfriend steals the money she risks life and limb to earn as a sex worker, Goca still loves him and manages to retain her sunny, open-minded nature. On her thirty-ninth birthday she decides to celebrate he rcoming out on stage in front of a live audience. And so she tells them the [...]

Olga is a complex young woman desperate to break free from her unfeeling family and social conventions. With her Louise Brooks like tomboyish looks she drags herself, chain-smoking, from one job to another until she appears to find her niche as a truck driver. Although she has female lovers she does not form a bond with any of them; instead she clashes, time and again, venting herself in wordless emotional outbursts and other behavioural extremes. Meticulously composed and shot in elegiac black-and-white [...]

James Gregory Atkinson’s performative short film centers the history of the iconic Peacock Chair to interrogate contemporary social contexts and historical concepts of identities. The film engages the chair’s origins in forced prison labor in the Philippines, its status as an internationally traded “exotic” commodity, its use in portrait photography, and its associations with Black radical activists such as Huey P. Newton—to explore ideas of Black masculinities [...]

On her 42nd birthday, Jane, a lesbian from San Francisco, decides to pay a visit to her native town in Ohio, with her lover in tow. Family dynamics force her to face her internalised homophobia seething under her ‘out and proud’ façade.

JANGRYESIGEUI MEMBER successfully balances an existential immediacy with subtle humour. While attending a young high school boy's funeral, a married couple and their teenage daughter reflect upon their own personal relationships to death. Slowly each of their individual connections to the dead boy emerges. Apparently he had been writing a novel entitled “Members of the Funeral”, where the troubled nature of a family is laid bare, triggered by their attendance at a youth's funeral… [...]

A studio. A man and a woman. Moving images on the screen, which he comments on, spurred on by her questions. All the footage was shot from the window of a flat: views of the street, the metro line running above it, the canal, into the windows of the buildings opposite. The flat belongs to the man’s lover, the man is a guest, spending his nights there but never his days. By the canal, young men from Afghanistan set up makeshift shelters as the man looks on, developing increasing sympathy [...]

„Je“ is a girl voluntarily lock up in a room.  „Tu“ is the script. „Il” is a lorry driver. „Elle“ is the girlfriend.   Julie, a young woman alone in a room moves her furniture, writes letters, and eats granulated sugar. She leaves her room and finds a driver with whom she eats and drinks. Later, she joins a young woman with whom she has sex.   In her boundary-breaking feature debut Chantal Akerman herself plays a young [...]

Young men find themselves scattered and defencelessly exposed to a merciless sun. Their gaze moves off searchingly into the distance. Deserted places appear to offer vague promises of refuge. On a prison wall, an explosive image of desire emerges, full of hope for freedom. Constantine Giannaris relishes in mixing light and colour with the textures of Super 8 and video footage to express the thoughts of the poet Jean Genet. Greatly affected by the AIDS epidemic, he addresses the desire for love [...]

One journey begins in Graz, in April 2020, the director’s trip back to China in the midst of the lockdown: flight connections on a cracked phone screen, hazmat suits on the aeroplane, tape sealing the hotel room door. But it also intermingles with another, earlier journey from the start, the family trip from China to Myanmar to find out what happened to great-grandfather, who left in the 1940s and never came back; his daughter, the grandmother, is still moved by his absence, [...]

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 [...]

Jonathan is 23; he and his aunt, Martha, work on their farm. Jonathan also devotes himself to looking after his father Burghardt, who has cancer. But, railing against his own decrepitude that prevents him from a dignified end, his father stubbornly sabotages all of his son’s efforts. Jonathan finds it increasingly difficult to cope until they hire a young carer, Anka, to help. Jonathan and Anka fall in love; her experience of working at a hospice helps Jonathan to gain a new inroad into [...]

Daniela may be quiet and elegant, but her thoughts are pretty wild and revolve mostly around sex and her need for self-fulfilment. Daniela lives for her blog. Only here can she speak openly about what turns her on. She has to do this in secret when she’s at her parents’ house, because she’s from an upper class family of wealthy, devout Protestants for whom everything is forbidden. Daniela is expelled from school after she sleeps with a boy. Her mother now sees her as a disgrace [...]

Youn So-young has contracted gonorrhoea. ‘Make me well again quickly’ she tells her gynaecologist, because she wants to get back to work. In a park in Seoul, this senior citizen manages to scrape together just enough money as a ‘Bacchus lady’ to avoid begging. ‘Bacchus ladies’ are elderly women who sell a popular soft drink containing taurine known as ‘Bacchus’ and offer sexual services on the side. Korea’s rapidly ageing society barely has [...]

Teheran in October 2000. A year ago, Moravid (which, translated, means “pearl”), was a man. Since her sex change she has lived in complete isolation in her tiny apartment. Now, for the first time, she dons the chador in order to leave her apartment – as a woman. What made Moravid decide to continue living as a woman in Iran? Her response challenges the clichés which are so prevalent in the West. This film provides a portrait of a country full of contradictions.