Blackstar: Autobiography of a Close Friend

The personal stories lived by the Uncle, the Father and the Son, respectively, form a tragic experience that is drawn along a line in time. This line is comparable to a crease in the pages of the family album, but also to a crack in the walls of the paternal house. It resembles the open wound created when drilling into a mountain, but also a scar in the collective imaginary of a society, where the idea of salvation finds its tragic destiny in the political struggle. What is at the end of that line? Will old war songs be enough to circumvent that destiny?

A filmmaker’s meditation on loss and grief. A digital eulogy and swan song to his creative partner and best friend. Mixed media woven into the fading daydream of their time together.

German iconoclast filmmaker and gay-rights activist Rosa vonPraunheim examines his own life and career in the documentary Phooey Rosa! With a quickly paced editing style, the film is a mix of personal banter, candid interviews, and clips from his filmography. It also includes footage from his early film Bed Sausage to his later work Neurosia. At the age of 60, vonPraunheim reveals intimate details about his past relationships and his childhood growing up after WWII. He also implicates some of his friends and inspirations, including Luzi Kryn and Rainer Kranach.

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.

A set of seven portraits consisting of personal accounts from the lives of gays and lesbians. The narration includes stories about coming out, bashing, cross-dressing and AIDS.

Grandma Kham, an 87 year-old-woman, lives lone and is still strong enough to burn charcoal and weed out grass. But what does she have to go through along the way? And how will she prepare for her own final moment?

Tommy sets out to document walking. He meets a colorful cast of characters, attaches microphones to his feet, and contends with what it means to capture movement on film.

On a sleepy summer night in 2004, eyes peer into the world-wide-web: traveling between conspiracy sites, malware, porn, and mp3 databases in an attempt to lose (find) themselves. Passing through blog graveyards, broken hyperlinks, and digital spirits, they begin to realize the Internet is so much more. Lost websites, anon forums, and inexplicable pixels singing to a prepubescent soul. An ode to the 2000s webpage and flash game culture.

A film that brandishes the documentry form and art to try to dismantle the stigma of being HIV positive that still persists in society. The film honours the past and the iconic Thom McGinty, the Diceman, who was one of the first to speak openly in Ireland about having AIDS but, other than that, it’s very firmly rooted in the here and now. Based on a theatre show, the stories in this film move between bodies of young men, migrant women, drag artists and activists. A form-flipping documentary, it features a cast of actors as well as ordinary people coming out on screen for the first time.

This semi-fictional short film follows the protagonist to Prague and explores how the medium of film can access the memories of a city. The film is based on the family history of the director, who fled Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968.