Archive

Exposed

In her previous work, underground artist Beth B has often addressedsuch topics as sexual repression and boundary transgression. In EXPOSED, she leads us through New York’s 21st century undergroundwhere classic burlesque – usually catering to the male gaze –  is being radically redefined, prevalent sexual clichés are interrogated,and deeper meanings are teased out in a humorous and sometimes shocking way. From its founder James Habacker, we learn ...

Extra Life (and Decay)

A polyphonic narrator – filmmaker, parent, forest, insects, fungi, childcare worker – declares their absolute refusal of labor exploitation, and their necessity to join collective bodies in resistance.

Extractions

Extractions parallels resource extraction with the booming child apprehension industry. As the filmmaker reviews how these industries have affected her, she reflects on having her own eggs retrieved and frozen to make an Indigenous baby.

Fabulous! The Story Of Queer Cinema

The pictorial depiction of gays and lesbians in American culture is a modern-day achievement – the result of gay and lesbian movements in the last third of the previous century. Up to that point, depictions of gay and lesbian life were considered taboo; and whenever they did appear, it was largely a question of stereotyping. Nowadays, queer images are to be found everywhere. Lisa Ades’ and Lesli Klainberg’s documentary describes how this change h...

False Belief

FALSE BELIEF is the love story of a couple caught up in the gentrification of a neighborhood that is wiping out a seminal African-American cultural legacy and displacing its original residents. In 2008 Norwegian artist and filmmaker Lene Berg moved in with her partner, a Black New York publisher, who will be referred to as D. After giving a statement to the police about being harassed by his neighbor in Harlem, D. was arrested, prosecuted, and i...

Fassbinder - lieben ohne zu fordern

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was probably Germany’s most significant post-war director. His swift and dramatic demise at the early age of 37 in 1982 left behind a vacuum in European filmmaking that has yet to be filled, as well as a body of unique, multi-layered and multifarious work of astonishing consistency and rigour. From 1969 onwards, Danish director and film historian Christian Braad Thomsen maintained a close yet respectfully distanced friendshi...

Fear of Disclosure

This was the first film to specifically address the difficulties in relationships between HIV-positive and HIV-negative men. Two go-go dancers assess each other’s mortality while the world rotates and a gay man reflects on the psychosocial consequences of the disclosure of his HIV infection. Video images caught in a loop of restless perseverance. A feverish attempt to make a film to battle the shock that the AIDS crisis presented to a vibrant se...

Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer

Felice chi é diverso

An older gay couple in a city in northern Italy talk about their decades-long relationship. A man describes how he was physically abused by his father because of his sexual identity. Another, who had a high-flying career, recounts a sexually fulfilled life and mentions numerous homosexual politicians. Gay men from across the social classes and regions of the country have their say and discuss the different conditions which determined gay life in ...

Female Misbehavior

In four short films, three women and a transgender man talk about their sexuality. In Bondage, Carol, a New York activist in the lesbian leather scene, explains her embrace of sadomasochism. Annie is a portrait of mousy Ellen Steinberg, AKA performance artist Annie Sprinkle, whose eccentric erotic shows give audiences, quite literally, insight into her anatomy. In eloquent and provocative dialogue, academic and social critic Camille Paglia talks...

Femme

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 appr...

Férfiakt

Although fiftyish Tibor is still attractive, his days as a successful screenwriter - if you could ever have called him that - are over. His wife was once a well-known actor and is still a beautiful woman. However, the only roles she gets nowadays are in provincial theatres. The couple's career prospects look bleak; their relationship has come to a dead end and only the fear of getting older forces them to keep up the appearance of a happy mar...

Feriado

In 1999, Ecuador’s banking system collapsed in the wake of a corruption scandal. These events provide the historical context for sixteen-year-old Juan Pablo’s enforced sojourn with his rich uncle and his family. Pensive Juan has absolutely no use for either this corrupt banker who has withdrawn to his refuge in the Andes, or his ignorant sons. One night he observes his uncle’s cronies brutally mishandling a man they discover tampering with their ...

Fieber

“Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood” (Pablo Neruda). It’s the early 1950s and little Franzi is growing up in the small Austrian town of Judenburg. Her oppressive family home is dominated by her feverish and mentally ill father, who is rigid and unpredictable. Her father, who regularly delivers halves of pork for the butcher, spent several years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Algeria and Syria – a period which he part...

Fifi az khoshhali zooze mikeshad

Bahman Mohassess was a celebrated artist at the time of the Shah. Trained in Italy, he created sculptures and paintings in his homeland. But audiences often took offence at the pronounced phalli on his mostly naked bronze figures and his work was regularly censored. All traces of him were lost after the revolution. It was said he destroyed his remaining paintings and disappeared. Mitra Farahani, who began her career as a painter, finds Mohassess ...

Fig Trees

An operatic documentary about the struggle of two Aids activists – Canadian Tim McCaskell and South African Zackie Achmat. Both have fought tooth and nail for the provision of anti-retroviral drugs to treat Aids. In John Greyson’s film they are ably supported by Gertrude Stein, a singing albino squirrel, and St. Teresa of Ávila. FIG TREES is nonetheless based on true stories. Tim McCaskell has spent more than twenty years fighting Aids and address...

Filth And Wisdom

Andriy Krystiyan, or A. K. for short, has come to England from the Ukraine. A. K. is a philosopher (at least that’s what he claims to be), a poet, and an authority on all aspects of life. At the same time, he is following his grand plan to become an international star. Global stardom is how A. K. describes the goal that he and his band Gogol Bordello are pursuing with their particular brand of boisterous gypsy punk. For the time being, however, h...

Final Stage

The present, the whole present and nothing but the present. A young man on a footbridge, a bus departs, his friend is gone. This is followed by a majestic parade through a shopping centre. This central shot in the film is a fragile balancing act between documentary observation and subtle direction. Deliberately asynchronous sound serves to heighten the sense that events are nothing more than a construction of an apparently familiar reality. The ...

Finding Vivian Maier

An older gay couple in a city in northern Italy talk about their decades-long relationship. A man describes how he was physically abused by his father because of his sexual identity. Another, who had a high-flying career, recounts a sexually fulfilled life and mentions numerous homosexual politicians. Gay men from across the social classes and regions of the country have their say and discuss the different conditions which determined gay life in ...

First a Girl

The fashion salon employee Elizabeth dreams of a stage career, the small-part actor Victor of a bright future as a Shakespearean mime. Both dreams fail miserably at the artists' agency. Victor will have to continue to appear as a female impersonator. When Elizabeth loses her job and Victor his voice due to a cold, the young woman stands in for him. She puts on trousers and now plays a man as a woman playing a woman. Her performance becomes a ...