A ghost ride through Finnish TV archives of the 1960s grazes the moon landing, American TV shows, a war in Africa. But how to connect with the world when dancing is forbidden?!
The anonymous narrator is a kind of web-adventurous flâneuse, neurotic and endlessly curious. A disturbance in the proprioception, which is the ability to sense the position, movement and location of the body and its parts, makes her perceive the world in a new way. Seemingly random anecdotes found on the internet and instructions from her cryptic physiotherapist start to come together in surprising ways. The found material forms a mosaic that reflects a world full of gazes, rules and technologies that separate us. Lines from the present and the distant past take our narrator to the 1960s, where medieval dance bans, televised wars, lost bones, space utopias and American TV stars collide. This film reflects how we can be and live in the world within ourselves and with each other. With those who are near and with those who are far. Along with all this, the film recommends dancing to everyone.
A journey through places and times that shaped the life of Turkish writer and human rights activist Aslı Erdoğan. She writes against silence, especially in exile.
Shattered photos, excerpts from newspapers and pieces of words become voices that spread through the alleys of a city until they reach the house of a writer, who’s writing a page. These fragmented voices tell the story of Aslı Erdogan, a Turkish author forced to live in exile in Europe after being imprisoned for her political ideas.
The voices narrate her life, from her childhood in Istanbul and her feminist commitment to the years as a researcher in Switzerland, the fugue to Brazil before returning to Istanbul, the heart of her lost country. Footage of travel and migration in search of work, images from physics laboratories, videos of protests against the authorities in Istanbul: these materials get mixed in a visual and sound flow becoming the essence of our collective memory, shared by every discriminated person, among them Aslı Erdogan during her exile. Meanwhile, the process of writing has erupted: the page contains words.
In heated, often hostile debates about homosexuality, trans and sex work, a young Armenian family tries to assert some kind of queer normality for themselves and others.
Carabina, a gay artist, transvestite, and ex-sex worker, is married to Hasmik, a heterosexual lawyer. They have just become parents and are facing a dilemma: Should they raise their child in Armenia, where 93% of the population is against homosexuality?
In Blind Date 2.0, Paul once again receives the filmmaker at his home – this time in order to shoot a sex date. Far from the spectacularly pornographic, but also from amateur porn, there is room to first of all clarify preferences, and consensus is established. Since both men are rather on the passive side and the double dildo fails to win over the visitor, they agree on a blowjob and find a practicable middle ground in mutual masturbation. Blind Date 2.0 does not aim at producing arousal but constitutes a doubly empathetic approach – that of the filmmaker to his protagonist, and that of the protagonist to his rather monosyllabic visitor. In targeted, unspectacular framing, the film captures the sex-positive in the ordinary, in the non-standardised, and above all in the context of social interaction: comprehensible, moving, and with a memorable cigarette afterwards.
Celestial Queer: The Life, Work and Wonder of James MacSwain
Celestial Queer: The Life, Work and Wonder of James MacSwain
Sue Johnson, Eryn Foster
DOK Film Market Exclusives
Documentary Film
Canada
2023
72 minutes
English
International Premiere open
Synopsis
Celestial Queer is a 72-minute feature documentary celebrating James MacSwain, a beloved queer artist, animator and gay rights activist. Born and raised in the “backwater” of Atlantic Canada, MacSwain has been making ground-breaking experimental films, animations and provocative art performances for more than half a century.
Through a combination of playful verité and rarely-seen footage from his archive, Celestial Queer accompanies MacSwain and a revolving cast of characters as he revisits everything from the sites of some of his most recognised works to the rocky tidal shores of Nova Scotia. The film also includes rarely-seen footage from the famous 1984 rooftop “Phallus Performance” during which MacSwain was almost arrested and charged with obscenity. New work has been made specifically in conjunction with the film, while also including restorations of over a dozen of MacSwain's 16mm films.
Jim's effusive character, prolific work, and community organising have inspired generations of artists to be fearlessly themselves. Celestial Queer now introduces audiences to one of Canada's best-kept secrets – an artist who is effortlessly charming, engagingly prolific, and subversive to his surrealist core.
A refugee camp built in Egypt in 1944 becomes the social model for Tito’s Yugoslavia. Archive material and contemporary witnesses tell a lived social-utopian origin story.
Frozen and starved people on boats in the Mediterranean Sea, fleeing from war. Scenes we are used to seeing in the news. But it's 1944, and refugees are travelling to Africa. Thirty thousand Dalmatians fled from the Nazis to live in tents in the Egyptian desert – making a utopian communist “model village”. This is a story about them.
Danielle's raw-filmed diary and Moe's vibrant queer memory of living with a sexually transmitted infection, ignite a collaborative exploration of bodies, intimacy, and shame.
A Beirut rooftop conversation about living with sexually transmitted infections opens into a cinematic dialogue, as Danielle and Moe draw raw and vibrant images from their personal experiences. Danielle filmed herself in sober and melancholic images to grasp what is going on, while Moe plays with memories and sensations of a queer body “invaded” by a virus.
While they engage with five actresses and actors to embody the testimonies of individuals who also lived with STIs, “forbidden” stories begin to exist and enter a collaborative exploration of intimacy, bodies, stigma and shame.
Gender transition is no different than any other human change. It has its ups and downs, scary, funny, strange, surprising, and frustrating little moments that are rarely talked about. This short film visually explores these moments through the eyes of Espi – a 24-year-old protagonist who just went through the transition.
Els is in her late forties, divorced and in love again. For her, falling in love was not easy: it meant that she had to accept, that she has a life even if her twenty-year-old daughter wants to die and has already asked for psychiatric euthanasia which her mother can do nothing about. In the storm of her own emotions, mixed with guilt, anger, fear and hope, love is what teaches Els to try stepping forward even if it seems impossible.
Falling is a lyrical, found-footage-based testimony from a mother who faces not only the taboos surrounding motherhood but also the most difficult situation in her life.
In 1943, Hitler ordered the destruction of Marseilles' oldest neighbourhood. Today, the last survivours fight to have this tragedy recognised as a crime against humanity.
The film follows the last survivors of this tragedy, as they deliver a last attempt to break the silence around these forgotten Nazi crimes. Through their direct accounts, the film also recounts the terrible days of the round-up, when France's oldest neighbourhood was raised to the ground and the life of hundreds of families, most of them first or second-generation migrants, was destroyed forever.
This desktop video essay examines how the media illustrate the issue of abortion. Clicking through photo databases and magazines reveals the consequences of suggestive images.
What do abortions look like? What kind of images shape our view on them? And where do these images come from? The desktop video essay getty abortions examines how German and Austrian media illustrate the topic of abortion, browsing through stock photo databases, teen magazines and personal documents of a real abortion experience. It jumps from the early 2000s to the late 19th century, seeks out feminist knowledge and chats with fictional characters. But one question remains: Why does no one look into the camera?
This impressionist hybrid documentary traces the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world's oyster capital. Now their spectre haunts the city through queer characters embodying ancient myth, discovering the overlooked history and biology of the bivalve that built the city. As environmentalists restore them to the harbour, Holding Back the Tide looks to the oyster as a queer icon, entangled with nature, with much to teach about our continued survival.
Old Super 8 films show domestic happiness, the West German economic miracle, an idyllic home, grandmother Rose as a young woman at the centre. They do not show the violence in Rose’s marriage. Or do they?
Home Sweet Home is a film about the invisibility of domestic violence. It is the story of the director's grandmother, Rose, who, for over 20 years, was married to a man who repeatedly abused her until she finally left him. Based on Super8 family archive, the director questions Rose, who continually dismantles the image of postwar West German family happiness. The film focuses on the discrepancy between appearance and remembered reality.
As domestic violence is usually not visible, the private abyss is skilfully hidden in public.
Three filmmakers research the history of a chemical factory in Cologne-Kalk. Off- and online archives teach them the art of weeding out and throwing away, the art of daring the gap.
In their documentary film, the three filmmakers Lea Sprenger, Franca Pape and Amelie Vierbuchen set out to find material about the Kalk chemical factory in Cologne. During their research at the Archive “Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv zu Köln”, they meet archivist Dr. Christian Hillen, who has a lot to say. While the archivist struggles with the 16mm film, the filmmakers dig through the chaos of sources and capitulate to the resistance of the material. Who decides which stories are saved or thrown away? A fast paced film about searching, throwing away, about gaps and mistakes and about one's own inability, which is repeatedly met with self-irony.
From 1974 to 1977, a huge trade fair centre was built in Lagos. Today nature and humans are reclaiming the ruins. Plants proliferate, small crafts flourish – a trans-historical site visit.
It was meant to be a place of trade, exchange and sharing. Now, there are flooded rooms, flowers and weeds and snails and birds, cut fruit and cut wood, cooks and carpenters, an artificial lake and football fields, Ema's memory of what once was here and Kendo's view of what one can see.
“The world in one garden” – with this claim of omnipotence, the construction of the Botanical Garden in Dahlem began. The deeper one enters, the clearer the traces of imperialist thinking emerge.
The film Showhouse portrays the botanical garden as a magical place, the charm of which lies in the interweaving of time spaces and world areas, and at the same time explores the abysmal nature of the botanical project. Plants have been shipped to European cities since the beginning of colonialism, gathered there and put on display. The exhibition of plants from around the world was intended to provide the metropolitan public with an image of the colonised territories. In addition, plants were cultivated and gardeners and colonial officials were trained to guarantee their economic productivity on the plantations in the colonies. Thus, botanical gardens were a part of European colonialism and its legitimisation.
A look back at the history of the botanical garden is combined with a look at present ideas of the future: while colonial plant collections of the late 19th century tell of the categorisation and domination of the “other”, in times of climate catastrophe, notions of gardens expanding into space, soothe fears about the limits of late capitalist civilisations and impending catastrophe.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.