Bodily Rites (Rights)

The short films included in the Bodily Rites (Rights) program focus on the human body and the tasks assigned to it in a natural and social sense. Using a variety of cinematic techniques, the filmmakers deconstruct the springs that govern traditional gender roles, arguing for the re-appropriation of the body as a vehicle for navigating desire. A heterogeneous selection that explores in sometimes a polemical, sometimes a playful way themes such as spirituality (taken together with the queer body), transhuman hybridisation between genders for the purpose of reproduction, while leaving space for reflection on complex personal, social and political dynamics - the recontextualisation of queer subjectivity in relation to the geographical existence of the individual, affective labour and gender politics, subsistence work and the tension between the body existing in space and the space co-existing in the body. (Emilian Lungu & Oana Ghera)

THE DEMANDS OF ORDINARY DEVOTION

Eva Giolo | Duration 12 min

A film on motherhood and creation constructed through various visual metaphors of circularity, The Demands of Ordinary Devotion speaks in a playful, yet lucid manner about the elusive link between care work and creative work.

HYSTERESIS

Robert Seidel | Duration 5 min

Hysteresis combines a queer performance with a series of video projections obtained by manipulating AI software to produce visual lags, starting from a suite of analog drawings. A visual translation of the concepts of hysteria and hysteresis as abstract as it is flamboyant.

EXALTED MARS

Jean-Sébastien Chauvin | Duration 18 min

In Exalted Mars, the body and the city are interconnected. Or, better said, outside happens inside. A man's bare body harmonises with the tension outside as the traffic loses its sound and is guided by the man's jerky breathing into the liminal space of sleep.

DIVA

Nicolas Cilins | Duration 29 min

Diva brings to the forefront a biography recounted from the non-western perspective of a trans person, whose subjectivity and manifestation of their identity is shaped in a particular way in the East. Furthermore, the film documents the everyday difficulties faced by queer people in Asia and their modes of subsistence.

BECOMING MALE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Pedro Neves Marques | Duration 22 min

Becoming Male in the Middle Ages is a story about fertility and the possibility of crossing the biological barrier related to reproduction, with the help of transhuman augmentation. The body becomes but a receptacle for the ovary or egg, which erases its biological limitations.

A BODY IS A BODY IS A BODY

Cat & Éiméar McClay | Duration 12 min

a body is a body is a body combines queerness and religion on a personal level, putting the subliminal tension between the two under the spotlight while treating it in a distant way, naturalising the interpenetrations between the two dimensions that are always understood as ricocheting off each other.