KuirFest Berlin – Rebelling ‘the History’: Queer Feminist Her*stories (short films)

Excerpts from press release by KuirFest Berlin

KuirFest Berlin offers a selection of convention-breaking films from recent productions on queer feminist cinema. The films will be followed by discussions with international guests, accompanied with workshops and parties.

KuirFest Berlin: Queer Feminist Rebels
Curated by Esra Özban and Esma Akyel
May 23 – June 7, 2019

Through the ‘KuirFest Berlin: Queer Feminist Rebels’ programme, the organisers aim to gather films and filmmakers as well as activists to explore queer feminist perspectives of gender and sexuality in cinema and beyond. The programme gathers films that transgress the dominant modes of filmmaking and suggests a transitive and fluid understanding of time, space, identity and sexuality.

Thursday, 30 May, 2019 at 19:30
Rebelling ‘the History’: Queer Feminist Her*stories, short film selection

The screening is followed by a collective discussion on queer feminist her*stories with an interactive play moderated by Zeynep Disbudak, Esma Akyel and Esra Ozban

Films:
Something Said, Jay Bernard, UK, 2017, 8 min
Rüya, Sinan Göknur, Turkey, 2018, 2 min 30 seconds
Reality Fragment 160921, Qigemu, USA/Sweden, 2017, 13 min
LYING WOMEN, Deborah Kelly, Australia, 2016, 3 min
Reclaiming Intersex, Gabrielle Le Roux & Nthabiseng Mokoena, South Africa, 2016, 28 min
These are My Hands, Evi Tsiligaridou, UK, 2018, 8 min
Archive of Feelings: Radical Compassion, Gizem Aksu, Turkey, 2018, 10 min

All films are in OV/English with Turkish subtitles

Haunted by that history, and in the context of the recent rise of the far-right and the tragedy of Grenfell, “Something Said” is an imaginative, gestural letter to Yvonne Ruddock, the 16 year-old whose birthday was being celebrated the night of the fire. “Rüya” is a queer dream emerging from the real ‘surreal’ scapes of Istanbul that hold in tandem so much suffering yet so much pleasure. “Reality Fragment 160921” follows two people in their process of reality-curation, revealing the careful cultivation of our own histories. “LYING WOMEN”, imagines art history’s most famous reclining nudes daring to escape from centuries of servitude to colonial heteropatriarchy. In “Reclaiming Intersex”, “I was born into a world that said: you do not exist, you should not exist, you cannot exist” says Nthabiseng Mokoena, an intersex in South Africa in 1978. “These Are My Hands” is a personal narrative of a trans body where pain, resistance, power and love become intertwined and merge into one, a visual poem written and voiced by playwright Jo Clifford. Whereas the world tends to reiterate its hot borders, conflictual discourses and neoliberal violence, “Archive of Feelings: Radical Compassion” reminds us it may be the time to remember there are worlds without ends.

KuirFest Berlin is a collaboration project between Pembe Hayat KuirFest – Pink Life Queer Fest and bi’bak. Program Curators: Esra Ozban, Esma Akyel.