US 2024, D: Constance Tsang, A: Haipeng Xu, Ke-Xi Wu, Kang-sheng Lee, 117′, OV with English subtitles, DCP
Amy and Didi live in Queens, New York. They both work and live together with other women in a massage parlour. After work, Didi meets married Cheung for dinner, where they chat and perform love songs in a karaoke bar. A sparkle escapes from the screen. Then tragedy strikes, tearing Didi from life. Life goes on, naked bodies come and go – and at some point, the friend and lover begin to encounter each other. In her debut feature film, filmmaker Constance Tsang tenderly depicts a bittersweet sadness and lostness. Consistently told from the perspective of the Chinese diaspora and with carefully composed images, BLUE SUN PALACE shows deep affection for its characters and their desires and feelings.
| Sun 21.09 2025 | Schaubühne Lindenfels |
| 9 PM | € 7,50 (6,50 reduced) |
In both gaming and film, FLINTA* perspectives have long been marginalised, objectified, pushed to the sidelines or even made invisible. But in the intermediate worlds of game engines, stories are flickering into existence, wanting to be told – stories of players, fighters and dreamers. The maps are drawn, the rules are set? But who says they can’t be rewritten? Machinima – the cyborg among film genres – is, if you will, a democratic instrument of filmmaking. Originating from gaming culture, the genre presents itself as an experimental, autonomous and rebellious film form that questions and breaks with traditional production methods. It is low-threshold, often DIY, hybrid and inherently collaborative. And despite this potential, the gaming worlds themselves – their designs, engines, interfaces, codes – remain predominantly male, white, cis and heteronormative.
This is where our film series RECLAIM THE FRAME comes in. The short film programme brings together five works by FLINTA* artists who use the tools of the gaming industry in an empowering way to give voice to their perspectives, their ideas, their anger. They expose consumption as a form of control, write mythical counter-narratives and question who has power over spaces, bodies and the future. The filmmakers turn away from the roles assigned to them and shift the axes of power: from consumer to creator, from object to subject, from victim to hero.
Last year’s film series OUR SCREENS offered an overview of the spectrum of films created within and inspired by game engines, showcasing the diverse creative potential of this young interface between gaming culture and filmmaking. Now we are focusing on those who were not intended to be part of these worlds: FLINTA* artists visibly traverse digital worlds, leaving behind cracks and disruptions – sowing new paths.
DON’T LEAVE ME!
US 2011, D: Angela Washko, 06:15’, OV, File
Angela Washko’s DON’T LEAVE ME! is a dense mash-up of scenes from various computer games such as Final Fantasy, Yalkyrie Profile and Metal Gear – role-playing games that Washko played regularly in her childhood. The collage addresses the stereotypical role of female avatars, who are often portrayed as helpless characters who can only be saved by the male hero. DON’T LEAVE ME! exaggerates this attribution and is an attempt to make female characters visible as complex subjects.
THIS BITCH AIN’T FREE
AU 2019, D: Georgie Roxby Smith, 05:07’, OV, File
Georgie Roxby Smith sends her avatar through the virtual, deserted consumer world of the once very popular online game Second Life, which has its own economy and in which players can build their virtual identities. The avatar runs, falls, glides and glitches through the digital ghost town, driven by the desire for a better life. In the rush and carnival of empty capitalism, patriarchal constraints and questions of sexual self-determination are revealed. An endless loop of desire.
A BRONZE ANWIL FALLS TO EARTH
US 2023, D: Carson Lynn, 06:32’, OV, File
In A BRONZE ANWIL FALLS TO EARTH, Carson Lynn transforms the dark and violent world of the role-playing game Bloodborne into a setting of queer suffering, defiance and resistance against oppressive forces. The film is created directly within the game and while playing: in the logic of a Let’s Play, we follow a lone warrior in the setting of the gothic-looking, cursed city of Yharnam, who, framed by Greek mythology, fights the proxy battle of the LGBTQIA+ community there.
THREE MANIPULATIONS
US 2020, D: Kara Güt, 9:38’, OV, File
Who is talking to whom here? The gamer with the game engine, with a chat acquaintance, or ultimately with themselves? In THREE MANIPULATIONS, we witness how two anonymous entities attempt to interact with each other and provoke intimacy in an otherworldly, digital foreplay. Kara Güt’s encrypted video performance reveals the gap between self and others, original and copy, reality and fantasy.
THE MARTIAN WORD FOR WORLD IS MOTHER
GB 2022, D: Alice Bucknell, 40’, OV, File
In THE MARTIAN WORD FOR WORLD IS MOTHER, Alice Bucknell outlines three future scenarios for Mars, exploring political, ecological, economic, metaphysical and linguistic aspects. The project is based on a collaborative, research-based practice: Bucknell worked with anthropologists, astronomers, space lawyers and linguists and drew inspiration from Donna Haraway’s feminist theories and Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction. We see precise 3D world-building and the use of artificial intelligence – the script was co-authored with the language AI GPT-3. A cinematic landscape of thought in which colonial, capitalist and patriarchal patterns are questioned and Mars is understood not as a territory to be conquered, but as a living counterpart.
| So 21.09 2025 | Schaubühne Lindenfels |
| 5 PM | € 7,50 (6,50 reduced) |
FR/LS/DE/QA/SA 2025, D: Lemohang Mosese, A: Siphiwe Nzima, Sobo Bernard, Mochesane Edwin Kotsoane, Rehauhetsoe Kotsoane, 88′, OV with English subtitles, DCP
A long, red ribbon of fabric fluttering through the mountainous landscape of Lesotho. This blood-soaked motif is a kind of underlying mood or main character in the film – it combines violence and beauty. Alongside this, we see other characters: a father tilling the soil with his son, a puppeteer who works as a teacher, an 80s BMW model rolling ominously through the streets, and an angry woman barking against her fate. Parallel to the images, we hear an autobiographical narrative by Lemohang Mosese from off-screen. Based on his experiences between Lesotho and Berlin, he speaks in poetic stories about growing up, about home as seen from exile, about the Ubuntu philosophy of southern Africa. The film is an impressive re-enactment of a possible future that feeds on a connection to the roots of the past.
| Sun 21.09 2025 | Schaubühne Lindenfels |
| 7 PM | € 7,50 (6,50 reduced) |
Trailer
ARCHIVE | Feministische Gegengeschichten
GIRLS IN UNIFORM
DE 1931, D: Leontine Sagan, A: Emilia Unda, Dorothea Wieck, Hertha Thiele, 96′, German OV, DCP
Conversation (in German) with Heide Schlüpmann & Karola Gramann
In film history, the name Hertha Thiele is primarily associated with two films: KUHLE WAMPE (DE 1932, D: Slatan Dudow, screenplay: Bertolt Brecht) and MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM (DE 1931, D: Leontine Sagan, screenplay: Christa Winsloe). In the latter, the young actress with the “brittle, half-broken voice” (contemporary and film critic Lotte Eisner) plays the role of Manuela von Meinhardis, a sensitive aristocrat’s daughter and orphan who is sent to a Prussian girls’ boarding school. The headmistress’s educational ideal: “Soldiers’ daughters to become soldiers’ mothers!” Manuela’s only escape from her daily routine of drill and lack of human contact is her teacher, Miss von Bernburg, who opposes the headmistress’s rigour. When Manuela publicly confesses her love for Miss von Bernburg, it causes a scandal. While the headmistress wants to blame Miss von Bernburg for the supposed moral decline and declares Manuela a moral danger, Manuela threatens to perish in her despair.
On the occasion of our thematic focus (OUT) OF THE ARCHIVE: FEMINIST COUNTER-HISTORIES, we will discuss the film and its history of creation and reception with the two film scholars and curators Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann. Special attention will be paid to the multifaceted biography of Hertha Thiele (born in Leipzig in 1908, died in East Berlin in 1984), which Schlüpman and Gramann researched in detail, including during an extensive interview that took place in the early 1980s.
At the time of its release, GIRLS IN UNIFORM was primarily interpreted as a critique of Prussian educational methods and as a coming-of-age story. Due to the film’s wide range of emotions and Thiele’s acting performances, it became a box office success throughout Europe, the USA and Japan. It was only later – after the film was made publicly available again in the late 1970s – that it not only became a cult lesbian film, but also underwent a differentiated analysis in the context of feminist film criticism. Hertha Thiele herself emigrated to Switzerland after her expulsion from the Reich Theatre and Film Chamber in 1937. After the end of the war, she returned to Germany for a few years, spending the 1950s and most of the 1960s in Switzerland, where she worked as a psychiatric nursing assistant. In 1966, she ventured to move again, this time to the GDR. There, she managed to establish herself at theatres, such as the Kellertheater in Leipzig, with guest performance contracts. From 1968 to 1979, she was a member of the German Television Theatre ensemble. In small roles, she portrayed “ordinary” women “from next door”.
Heide Schlüpmann (born 1943) is professor emeritus of film studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. She studied philosophy under Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, among others. In the late 1970s, she was part of a working group on Nazi entertainment films. From 1991 to the late 1990s, she was co-editor of the magazine Frauen und Film (Women and Film). In 2000, she co-founded Kinothek Asta Nielsen e.V. with Karola Gramann, among others, marking the beginning of a collaborative curatorial activity that continues to this day.
Karola Gramann (born 1948) is a film scholar and film curator. Until 2022, she will be the artistic director of Kinothek Asta Nielsen e.V. in Frankfurt am Main. She translated Laura Mulvey’s key feminist text “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” into German. She contributed to the magazine Frauen und Film for several years. Main areas of work: film work by women in history and the present, early cinema and avant-garde, queer cinema. 1985–89: director of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
| Sun 21.09 2025 | UT Connewitz |
| 2 PM | € 7,50 (6,50 reduced) Conversation (in German) with Heide Schlüpmann & Karola Gramann |
Trailer
