Otto lives in a remote village, where he spends a lot of time with his best friends. But there’s someone he misses dearly. His boyfriend, who is a professional dancer, lives hundreds of miles away. Otto finds comfort in his lover’s movements and uses his own body to bridge the distance between them.
This is the story of Copa-Loca. Paulina is the girl at the heart of this abandoned Greek summer resort. Everyone cares for her and she cares about everyone – in every possible way.
Set in a post-apocalyptic near-future, La Jetée tells the story of an unnamed man whose vivid childhood recollections make him the perfect guinea pig for an experiment in time travel. After a lengthy period of conditioning, he is sent back in time, where he falls in love with a woman whom he once saw on a pier.
After going missing, a woman is unable to remember her past until her former husband pays her a visit and she recalls a memory of where she lived with the man a long time ago.
Confused about German bureaucracy and questioning her sexuality, Hoda, an Iranian asylum seeker in Berlin, finds herself hooked on Magdalena, who promised to ensure her asylum by marrying her. Due to changes in Magdalena’s private life, her decision to marry Hoda becomes more complex.
Swollen Stigma is a visual, surrealistic narrative about a woman travelling both literally and psychically through several rooms. Memories, or fantasies, of another woman, fill her imagination. The film proposes lesbian imagery, and its shifting points of view jump between the protagonist, fantasy spaces, and her lover, making an internal world leak into what is external.
The work of French activist, novelist, and essayist Jean Genet was considered controversial in the forties and fifties, because of its explicit homosexuality. Genet made only one film in his entire life, but Un Chant d’amour went on to inspire both David Bowie and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay that questions the alleged innocence of handbags in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. In doing so, Maryam Tafakory provides a robust political analysis of censorship and intimacy.
After the revolution in 1979, Iran prohibited the depiction on the silver screen of men and women touching. Since then, directors have relied on every cinematic trick in the book to mirror ecstatic tension. Nazarbazi collages these intense cinematic moments into a poem about love and desire.
This bittersweet film from Jean Renoir, based on a story by Guy de Maupassant, is a tenderly comic idyll about a city family’s picnic in the French countryside and the romancing of the mother and grown daughter by two local men.
Maryam Tafakory creates an intimate inner world that moves between the concrete and the abstract. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. Mast-del is a love song that would never pass through censorship.
A tale of first love. Romeo and Polly sit in separate cars outside a pub, waiting for their parents. They're bored until they notice each other—at first, they bicker and play it cool, but by the time they have to say goodbye, the sparks of first love are flickering.
It is sometimes said that if a man places a pearl under the skin of his penis, he will bring the woman the greatest pleasure. He grants her the greatest of all pleasures, while she will give him anything he desires. After a playful love dance, she melts into him, at the cost of losing themselves in each other to arrive at their deepest desires.
A sparing and minimal travelogue of Istanbul. A foreigner meditates on the unraveling of a relationship while moving from hotel room to hotel room. In a city simultaneously devoted to Islam and secular nationalism, she finds refuge in the frailty and severity of rituals.
A broken phone and the digital memory of a broken queer relationship. Through the careful manipulation of discarnate metal components and the filmmaker’s attentive look at an intimate archive, a fading first love surfaces. Loveboard is a playful reflection on what remains.
Martí arrives in Bilbao for an artistic residency. In his new room, his clothes occupy only a small portion of the enormous wardrobe. But when he meets someone, the wardrobe slowly begins to fill up. Where has the emptiness gone, the free space, the little corner that was his?
A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between artist Carolee Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney, observed by their cat, Kitch.
In this fictional epistolary film, writer Marguerite Duras, a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War and partner to a Holocaust survivor, uses her titular alter ego to voice a deeply personal grief.
