Film and _ #6 Queer Historie(s)

Maksim Avdeev, Monument, 2025, 15 min
Philipp Gufler, The Beginning of Identification, and its End, 2024, 19 min
Ian Kaler, The Growing Edge, 2025, 17 min (Weltpremiere)  

All day long in the foyer:
Daniela Zahlner, Sexy 8, 2012, 3 min

Curated by Stefanie Reisinger and Dietmar Schwärzler
Talk with Ian Kaler after the screening

Film and _ is an open invitation to exchange: the format is explicitly dedicated to artist film and its interrelations with other visual, applied and time-based art forms. Queer Historie(s) shows three current works that deal with fluid identity politics in different contexts: The “I” in the mirror of complex family histories, historical reflections and contemporary political discourses.

After Russia's attack on Ukraine in February 2022, and the further tightening of legislation against the LGBTIQ+ community in the same year, Maksim Avdeev decides to leave his home country and emigrates to Berlin. With the help of home movies from the family archive, which present an intimate, loving relationship between father and son, the filmmaker reflects in Monument on the rupture with his father that accompanies his coming out. In the conversations that now take place, the different world views collide. For The Beginning of Identification, and its End, Philipp Gufler draws on text passages by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a pioneer of sexology who fought for legal equality as early as the 19th century and created the concepts of Urnlinge (homosexuals) and Dioninge (heterosexuals) in reference to Plato's Symposium. Archival film scenes showing transident, transgressive content and a homage to a performance by the legendary artist Ben D'Armagnac (in which he had a jet of water sprayed on his heart for 40 minutes and his heartbeat transmitted through a loudspeaker) counteract and comment on polemical speeches by far-right politicians such as Pim Fortuyn or Alice Weidel. In Gufler's cosmos, identity is a fluid concept that cannot be fixed, in line with the original intention of the term queer. In his most recent film The Growing Edge, which premiered here, Ian Kaler, on the other hand, plays/dances free of the political framework, developing “an auto-theory of the relationship between sentient beings, between man and nature and gender history along the narrative of his relationship to his horse and father” (Andrea B. Braidt). Daniela Zahlner explores the erotic implications of the film apparatus in Sexy 8, which will be presented all day in the foyer of Belvedere 21. Cheers Dears.

A cooperation between Belvedere21/Blickle Kino and sixpackfilm