LEGACIES OF RESISTANCE

Curators: Walter Crasshole, Jurgen Bruning

Explicitly queer cinema has always dealt with sexualities but through its decades-long history, these films have one other thing in common: they champion a culture of resistance. Resistance against normative sexualities, the patriarchal hegemony, capitalism… queer cinema has rebelled against many forms of oppression over the years and will continue to resist new forms in the future. Pornfilmfestival Berlin curators Jürgen Brüning and Walter Crasshole present a program of films from their own contexts that reflect this legacy.

Bruce LaBruce has been making subversive queer cinema since the mid-1980s but it was arguably 2004’s  The Raspberry Reich that broke him to a wider audience, while at the same time staying resolutely underground. Following the credo of “There can be no revolution without sexual revolution and there can be no sexual revolution without homosexual revolution,” Raspberry Reich follows Gudrun and her group of radical leftists in Berlin as they try not only to subvert oppressive capitalist structures but heteronormative ones as well. The gang bang the system – and each other. Raspberry Reich is also the beginning of LaBruce’s modern filmmaking style, including his trademark sloganeering.