The Weight of Sight is a playful and very personal essay where director Truls Krane Meby, through a massive archive of his own material - anything from DV-tapes to 35mm - explores the last 20 years of digital development - how it’s influenced the images we make, and our bodies. What kind of images do we get of the world now that everyone is a photographer, and what does it do with how we unfold our identities? How has the internet both captured and freed us? And will Truls even dare to show this film?
Following the lives of Queer creatives behind Norwich’s queer collaborative ‘Stripped Sets’. We discover the reasoning behind the need for safe spaces, and the stories that come with them. Through live events, photoshoots and history, we see the process in creating such an important event.
Dom Barbudo, a pioneer in the São Paulo gay and BDSM community and elected first Mister Leather Brasil in 2017, prepares to pass on the mantle to one of the four contestants in the second edition of the contest.
Across the installation's multiple channels, the camera circles a group of artists as they sit together in a field eating, licking, and squeezing ripe tomatoes. Throughout the ever-changing scene, kisses, whispers, and caresses are shared with a casual, gentle intimacy that reflects interconnectivity and abundance. These queer and desirous exchanges constitute a portrait of collectivity wherein individuals come together as distinct parts of a whole.
"There are things in this world that are yet to be named" centers around Solanum plastisexum - an Australian tomato whose sexual expression is unpredictable and unstable, challenging even the fluid norms of the plant kingdom. Footage of the team of botanists who recently used their Solanum research to explode notions of sexual normativity in any plant or animal is combined with a voiceover of letters sent between science writer Rachel Carson and her lover Dorothy Freeman. "There are things in this world that are yet to be named" is a meditation on erasure, indefinability, and the intersection of queer and environmental histories.
Grafite é do Morro
The documentary presents an overview of Vladimir Carvalho's cinematographic career, from the very beginning, as a co-writer of “Aruanda” (1960), directed by Linduarte Noronha, to the present day. With Vladimir himself as the main narrator and illustrated by scenes from his films, the documentary also features interviews with Gilberto Gil, Orlando Senna, Arnaldo Carillo, Dácia Ibiapina, Fernando Duarte, Sérgio Moriconi, among others.
Hard to imagine, but true: According to current estimates, out of 500,000 active male football professionals worldwide, under ten (10) are openly homosexual. While homosexuality hardly plays a role in other areas of life today, the topic seems to be completely taboo in professional football. The feature-length documentary THE LAST TABOO lets those who broke exactly this taboo tell their very personal stories alongside Thomas Hitzlsperger. Like the British professional footballer Justin Fashanu (*1961 in London; † 1998 in London), who broke this taboo for the first time in 1990 and paid for it with his life. His niece Amal tells his story. Marcus Urban, on the other hand, was about to make the jump to the Bundesliga as a teenager and, by deciding to come out, he also went against his big dream. The stories of the US professional Collin Martin and the British player-coach Matt Morton, on the other hand, suggest that normality is not far away.
A sensitive heart-warming story of an Indian transman's acceptance, by himself and his family. Merlin, born as a girl, felt right from his childhood that he was trapped in the wrong gender.
Four precocious preteens perfect their lip-synching and runway walks in anticipation of the biggest drag performance of their lives at Montreal Pride, in this fierce and joyous celebration of acceptance and self-discovery.
Trixie charmed audiences and judges as winner of RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. But the grind of performing and the pressure of the title proves that heavy is the head that wears the tiara.
a small island
When artist Erin Johnson and film editor Charlotte Prager moved into a seaside house in 2021, they knew only a handful of facts about the two women who designed and built it in 1971. The two women - art collector Mary-Leigh Smart and artist Beverly Hallam - were exacting about their specifications for the house, and they lived there together for over forty years. In "To be Sound is to be Solid," the filmmakers venture to decipher the house's opaque queer history by studying its complicated and circuitous floor plan. "To be Sound is to be Solid" is a film of layered intimacies and vicarious encounters. By investigating indefinability, erasure, and transparency in queer archives and scientific research, the film builds connections between lesbian, architectural, and environmental histories.
125 employees of the Catholic Church come out as queer! In the exclusive ARD documentary, believers in the service of the Catholic Church in Germany dare to go public together. People who identify as non-heterosexual talk about fighting for their church - sometimes at the risk of losing their jobs as a result. There are priests, religious brothers, parish assistants, diocese employees, religion teachers, kindergarten teachers, social workers and many more who report intimidation, denunciations, deep injuries, decades of hide and seek and double lives. The Catholics report a system in which pressure, fear and arbitrariness leave employees uncertain as to what exactly happens when they stand by their sexual orientation or identity. The investigative documentary listens to those who live their faith every day and are nevertheless degraded by the church as an institution.
In this documentary, director Rhys Ernst tells the previously untold histories of transgender pioneers. Trans people have always been here, throughout time, often hidden in plain sight.
Corrupt Colour follows childhood friends and self-proclaimed internet pop-stars, Emily and Gia as they set up their first live concert but their delusions of grandeur are compromised when the live show of their dreams becomes a nightmare. The show must go on and with the help of their closest friends, irreverent leads Emily and Gia are forced to reckon with their true place in the public eye. With poignant lyrics, loud personalities, and unique creative decisions, Emily and Gia take us on a hilarious and melancholy journey through identity in the digital age that leaves us all asking "who am I trying to be?"
Peter Grudzien is the lone musical force behind The Unicorn, an openly gay country music album. With the same rawness of a life full of ups and downs, The Unicorn, the movie, follows his personal and artistic journey, which includes mental problems and a peculiar and chaotic family.
At 18, George Ward left the Gypsy community. He had felt rejected having come out as gay. Leaving his Gypsy identity behind, he invented Cherry Valentine, a drag alter-ego. Now he wants to find out if he can be accepted as a queer Gypsy and feel proud.
Lake gazes down at a still body of water from a birds-eye view, while a group of artists peacefully float in and out of the frame or work to stay at the surface. As they glide farther away and draw closer together, they reach out in collective queer and desirous exchanges — holding hands, drifting over and under their neighbors, making space, taking care of each other with a casual, gentle intimacy while they come together as individual parts of a whole. The video reflects on notions of togetherness and feminist theorist Silvia Federici’s call to “reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and our bodies.”
Heiko, 51, a sheet metal former trained in GDR times, unemployed since the fall of the wall, pisses on his bed and on the carpet. The film encounters Heiko's dysfunctional family history and his decision to be alone forever. Piss and GDR, a reflection of how deep the consequences of the fall of the Wall are still in the bodies of some people to this day.