GAZE 2020 - Focus on Germany
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Ulrike Ottinger. Monika Treut. Douglas Sirk.
You know what I mean.
Germany has made a huge impact on LGBTQ+ cinema, and today it represents a nation of liberal values and personal freedoms - of course anyone who takes the odd weekend trip to Berlin knows that!
German filmmakers have long contributed to queer visibility, whether LGBTQ+ people themselves, or allies with a firm sense of human dignity. In Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform (1931), it is not the young student with same-sex desires who is punished, but the villainous headmistress who wants to shame her. Those who joined us for GAZE 2019 may have seen Different from the Others (1919), a landmark film, now over a century old, that treated its homosexual characters with sympathy. From the horrors of the Second World War, emerged a nation determined to right its wrongs.
At GAZE 2020 we want to honour Germany's contribution to queer cinema, but without turning to obvious names and films, as much as we love them! Instead we present three very different feature films as well as two short films. The features each represent an aspect of German LGBTQ+ life and experience. Cocoon is a beautiful and life-affirming coming of age story about one girl's transformative summer, Taxi Zum Klo is a raucous and hilarious snapshot of West Berlin gay life in 1980 that feels shockingly current, and Closing Film No Hard Feelings explores life as a second generation German-Iranian and speaks very much to our time.
We want to thank the Goethe-Institut Irland for their continued support in presenting German cinema in Ireland, and their willingness to support a motley crew of films, which is exactly what we stand for!
Seán McGovern
The films screening as part of the festival are:
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TAXI ZUM KLO / Dir. Frank Ripploh / West Germany / 1980
COCOON / Dir. Leonie Krippendorf / Germany / 2020
NO HARD FEELINGS / Dir. Faraz Shariat /Germany / 2020
and short films Faragh/Void in Men's Shorts and When the Androgynous Child in Experimental Shorts.