Ruinas Futuras

Wim Wenders ponders about the future of our society and film making amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.

Interviews from 1999, with some queer artists, activists and bands about queer punk, feminist concepts and actions. Filmed during a trip to San Francisco.

In the suburbs of Toulouse, a group of queers and migrants are squatting a pink house. They find traces of the previous occupants, and try to live with the memory of a crime.

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.

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.

In Saigon, family culture carries on as it has for centuries, even when blood ties are broken. Through a mosaic of intimate portraits, Má Sài Gòn explores humanity’s universal desire for love, acceptance, connection and belonging through an LGBTQ+ lens. The film is a love letter – a bittersweet ode to a comforting yet disturbing mother, to a city that is as liberating as it is oppressive.

After finding some videos she uploaded to YouTube when she was a child, Manuela attempts to follow the trail she herself has left on the Internet. A search that looks into all that things that won't never die and that, especially, thinks about the way we look at ourselves.

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.

During the 16th Workers' Festival in Dresden in 1976, a student group of Chilean emigrants paints a mural symbolically depicting the activity of the Unidad Popular during Salvador Allende's reign. Festival guests comment on this work. Music by Chilean music group Jaspampa, formed in Leipzig in 1972.