Through the voices of Americans from all walks of life, The Out List explores the identities of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community in America. In this series of intimate interviews, a diverse group of LGBTQ personalities bring color and depth to their experiences of gender and sexuality. With wit and wisdom, this set of trailblazing individuals weaves universal themes of love, loss, trial, and triumph into the determined struggle for full equality.
In 1972, John Wojtowicz attempted to rob a Brooklyn bank to pay for his lover’s sex-change operation. The story was the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon. The Dog captures John, who shares his story for the first time in his own unique, offensive, hilarious and heartbreaking way. We gain a historic perspective on New York's gay liberation movement, in which Wojtowicz played an active role. In later footage, he remains a subversive force, backed by the unconditional love of his mother Terry, whose wit and charm infuse the film. How and why the bank robbery took place is recounted in gripping detail by Wojtowicz and various eyewitnesses.
Tamara, Desiree, and Victoria are Venezuelan women who live in Caracas and at first glance have little in common. However, all three share much more than the city they live in: they carry an ID that shows a name that is not theirs. They are transgender women. In Venezuela, you cannot legally change the name you were born with. The women unite and through a series of legal actions and tireless activism for equality, these women will test the willingness of Venezuelan institutions to ensure the basic right of its citizens: the right to identity.
In Les Portes d’Arcadie, we are at the heart of a reception center for asylum seekers. The director gives a voice to people persecuted because of their sexual orientation, in their country of origin. Already gone, but not yet in a new home, these displaced people are looking for themselves as much as they are looking for the words to describe what they have known and left behind. What awaits them? It is not certain. But at least they can hope to finally be (re) recognized for themselves. This crossing, as much as this quest for identity, is at the heart of this documentary.
The one-off documentary tells the story of two women travelling by bike across the United States, from Canada to Mexico along the Great Divide. A unique adventure through the most remote areas of the Rocky Mountains, between pristine nature and wild animals. An epic journey that led them to travel 4,000 km and climb 60,000 meters and that, day after day, forced them to face their own limits, their strength and fragilities, and tested their relationship. Because every journey is always a love story.
Caught between two genders, the artist Eli Leven and Ester Martin Bergsmark touch and caress each other, while they bath together in clouds of steam. A persuasive voice-off describes the often hard and painful growing process, which led them to choose to be neither males nor females. But something else entirely. While memories of adolescences scarred by homophobia and discrimination are presented, the audience is also captivated by poetic evocations of bodies, of snowy woods, water, nature, and snails: the symbol of androgyny. This movie moves the audience profoundly. It is a hymn to sexual fluidity, which reveals the search for the true self, rendered through the use of contrasting, vivid, and often acid bright photography. Intended as a television portrait of the transgender artist Eli Leven, it is a psychedelic docu-fiction, a hybrid movie inspired by Derek Jarman's Sebastian.
Trans-Action tells the story of an extraordinary woman. Anna Grodzka who in 2011 became the first transgender person in the Polish government, and the third transgender member of government in world history, was born in the male body and decided to finally begin her life as a woman only in her 50s. The film documents the most important chapters in this intimate process of transformation. We observe Anna in her daily activities in Warsaw, we witness her intimate conversations with her son and closest friends.
A dance group rehearses for their latest performance Inabitáveis about black homosexuality. While the choreographer conducts research and gives guided tours, he meets Pedro, a young trans girl looking for her own means of expression. She desperately wants to be taught by him.
Nude men in rubber suits, close-ups of erections, objects shoved in the most intimate of places—these are photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, known by many as the most controversial photographer of the twentieth century. Openly gay, Mapplethorpe took images of male sex, nudity, and fetish to extremes that resulted in his work still being labelled by some as pornography masquerading as art. But less talked about are the more serene, yet striking portraits of flowers, sculptures, and perfectly framed human forms that are equally pioneering and powerful.
On 25th December 2011 the Georgian Patriarch Ilia II described his 34 year-long leadership as head of the Georgian Orthodox Church as a ‘sunny night’. Beginning in 1989, and going up to the present, the film essay Sunny Night tells of political and social events since Georgian Independence. A variety of formats and sources, disparate images and voices report on protests, recommencements, uproars and wars, and religious identity that centres around the dominant religion of the nation. In the midst of the ongoing shifts and the various state of affairs, the patriarch stands out as the only constant figure. Meanwhile the sermonised religion begins to take on radical forms, going as far as priests forming front row human-chains, leading protests of several thousand orthodox believers chasing a handful of LGBT activist throughout the streets of Tbilisi in May 2013.
The Same Difference is a documentary about lesbians who discriminate against other lesbians! The Same Difference, through a series of lesbian women stories, discusses the hypocrisy in terms of gender roles and the per formative expectations.
From a young age, Natsuki knew she was a girl despite her sex assigned at birth. Against the backdrop of conservative Japanese society, this poignant docudrama tells her remarkable story of gender transition. Reflecting on her high school years, Natsuki interviews the supportive friends and family who supported her choices – and also confronts the people those who oppressed her freedom. Tracing Natsumi’s story to the present, this compelling portrait of gender identity in contemporary Japan offers insights of a layered experience in a complex society.
A legendary entertainer and a pioneer of gay activism, Miwa was born Akihiro Maruyama. As a young singer, Miwa popularized androgyny as a fashion statement, fusing the masculine and the feminine into a signal of a new generation of aesthetics. This evolved into performing as a woman and living off-stage as a man. With glitter, wit, evening gowns, and enchanting storytelling, Miwa looks back over a 50-year career and a fascinating life in music, film, and television.
Love & Sex under Nazi Occupation questions the burning mystery of intimate heterosexual and homosexual relations in times of war... and shows how being close to death reinforces the yearning for passion, for pleasure, for transgression, for desire as a last burst of freedom, as an ultimate call to life. Nearly two hundred thousands children are thought to be born of the union of French women with German soldiers. Women weren't the Germans' only conquests; indeed, occupied Paris swarms with all kinds of homosexuals—from Genet to Cocteau—who treated with the occupier. The fate of those women who were shaved at the end of the war for fraternizing with Germans is the punishment of a France that lied down and slept with the enemy.
Never before has the extraordinary life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo been framed in relation to the full spectrum of the historical and cultural influences that shaped her. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FRIDA KAHLO explores the 20th century icon who became an international sensation in the worlds of modern art and radical politics.
“This film is part of a series of films on gay men who survived the Nazi era. I met Walter Schwarze when he was already in his eighties. My camera recorded his first public account of his five-year incarceration as a homosexual at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was in his fifties when he met Ali in his hometown of Leipzig; the two men became partners and remained close until his demise. And yet, Walter told me, he felt he had lived in vain because he had not had the good fortune of today's gays, who are able to grow up in freedom. Walter Schwarze died of cancer on May 10, 1998.” Rosa von Praunheim
A ridiculous mini-doc about Bill Daughton and his creation of a six-foot penis costume at the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, New York. See Daughton dressed up in the giant penis costume, walking around campus, catching the subway, and chatting with people about the costume on his way to the Halloween Parade. (Oddball Films)
Documentary about the fight for LGBTQ-rights in Sweden during the 1970s.
A road trip through gay spaces in small town South Africa, Graeme Reid's documentary introduces viewers to hairstylists, preachers, traditional healers, and beauty queens. This moving film provides an alternative vision of acceptance and celebration, in contrast to the wave of homophobia that is sweeping across sub-Saharan Africa.
In the summer of 2008, Enzo travels to Berlin to work on a creative documentary and find a former lover.