Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, Terror Nullius is a world in which minorities and animals conspire and not-so-nice white guys finish last. Where idyllic beaches host race-riots, governments poll love-rights and the perils of hypermasculinity are overshadowed only by the enduring horror of Australia’s colonising myth of terra nullius.

Curators statement Esra Özban and Esma Akyel:

"Terror Nullius, which is an example of queer cinema that draws attention with its extraordinary formal style as well as its anti-colonial and feminist content, “terrorizes” the colonial history of Australia and its own cinema and television history by instrumentalizing it through the use of mashup technique. Composed of three parts, the film transforms the minorities from the Australian cinema history into avengers and rebels by creating critical images that expose the crimes in question, thanks to its deconstructive editing that changes contexts.”

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Bartholomew Sammut was awarded "most promising new filmmaker" at the Warner Roadshow New QLD Filmmakers Awards in 2000. Bartholomew went on to continue to produce a number of short films, documentaries and theatre performances as well as working on a number of short film festivals as well as curating external film programmes for other festivals, and in 2015 established the Queer Short Film Fund, an initiative from the XPOSED International Queer Film Festival. In 2019, Bartholomew was also a member of the Berlinale Series Selection Committee and is currently developing their first feature film. Bartholomew does not know what pronoun to use, so Bartholomew uses them all.

Soda_Jerk is a two-person art collective who work at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images: how they circulate, whom they benefit, and how they can be undone. Predominantly working with video, their sample-based projects have also taken the form of cut-up texts, manifestos, screensavers and lecture performance. Formed in Sydney in 2002, they have been based in New York since 2012.

Vegan Inclusive Trans Cake and More: Pembe Hayat Online

Following the bans issued by the governorship of Ankara against all LGBTI+ related public events in November 2017, Pembe Hayat LGBTI+ Solidarity Association decided to use online channels as a tool for video-activism to motivate the community that could otherwise not get together. Pembe Hayat’s online channel became a performance space and an alternative resisting medium for the trans community. The selection is composed of several videos with different themes and forms. A transvestite goes for an inspection, bakes a special cake and makes “madi” (trolling) comments. Pembe Hayat videos will be screened for the first time with English subtitles.

Pembe Hayat online channel

Sude Derin is a 20 years old trans activist. She has been working at Pembe Hayat LGBTİ+ Solidarity Association for four years. She got involved in Pembe Hayat with the festival KuirFest when she was 16, and since then she has been an activist in LGBTI+ movement. She makes peer counseling on gender reassignment process within Pembe Hayat.

Nalan is trans and a video-activist. In her leisure times when she can not use the coquetry as a mass weapon against hate, she explores things such as toying with a camera, and she shows them by cutting, patching and montaging. Now, she is transforming at Pembe Hayat, and in the meantime she shoots and edits. And in her spare times she goes on putting on coquettish airs.

Against ‘the History’, with a capital H, this selection gathers shorts that can be interpreted as queer feminist interventions to conventional ways of History-making. This selection is an invitation to think collectively about the queer feminist historicity, non-linear, non-hegemonic her* stories and the (re-)creation of queer pasts and futures.

Films:

Something Said, Jay Bernard, UK, 2017, 8 min
Rüya, Sinan Göknur, Turkey, 2018,  2 min 30 seconds
Reality Fragment 160921, Qigemu, USA/Sweden, 2017, 13 min
LYING WOMEN, Deborah Kelly, Australia, 2016, 3 min
Reclaiming Intersex, Gabrielle Le Roux & Nthabiseng Mokoena, South Africa, 2016, 28 min
These are My Hands, Evi Tsiligaridou, UK, 2018, 8 min
Archive of Feelings: Radical Compassion, Gizem Aksu,  Turkey, 2018, 10 min

Haunted by that history, and in the context of the recent rise of the far-right and the tragedy of Grenfell, Something Said is an imaginative, gestural letter to Yvonne Ruddock, the 16 year-old whose birthday was being celebrated the night of the fire. Rüya is a queer dream emerging from the real ‘surreal’ scapes of Istanbul that hold in tandem so much suffering yet so much pleasure. Reality Fragment 160921 follows two people in their process of reality-curation, revealing the careful cultivation of our own histories. LYING WOMEN, imagines art history’s most famous reclining nudes daring to escape from centuries of servitude to colonial heteropatriarchy. In Reclaiming Intersex, “I was born into a world that said: you do not exist, you should not exist, you cannot exist” says Nthabiseng Mokoena, an intersex in South Africa in 1978. These Are My Hands is a personal narrative of a trans body where pain, resistance, power and love become intertwined and merge into one, a visual poem written and voiced by playwright Jo Clifford. Whereas the world tends to reiterate its hot borders, conflictual discourses and neoliberal violence, Archive of Feelings: Radical Compassion reminds us it may be the time to remember there are worlds without ends.

The screening is followed by a collective discussion on  queer feminist her*stories with an interactive play moderated by Zeynep Dişbudak, Esma Akyel and Esra Özban.

Voltrans is a trans man initiative in Turkey, which is composed of three trans men that found each other in 2007. This documentary project came up in order to make the stories of those trans men coming together, acting together visible, share the experiences and problems of those people, document their own histories. In this feature-length movie that is shot since March 2012, trans activists who banded together in Voltrans sincerely tell what it means to be a trans man in a heterosexist and transphobic society which is founded upon binary gender system and how they fought back against stereotypes of masculinity and “trans manhood”.

Curator's statement Esra Özban and Esma Akyel:

"The documentary tells the story of Voltrans – the very first trans men initiative in Turkey – by the lips of its founders and LGBTI+ activists within the frame of how they acquainted with each other and how the initiative influenced on LGBTI+, feminist and transfeminist movements in Turkey".

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Rüzgâr Buşki is an artist, director and producer from Istanbul. His artistic practice varies within printmaking, performance, video and film. He studied Journalism at Istanbul University. Since 2011, Buşki studies multimedia at Berlin University of Arts in the class of Prof. Dr. Hito Steyerl. He is one of the founders of Kanka Productions, a trans-feminist production collective for empowerment of women and trans on fields of visual and performing arts. His first feature documentary with Kanka Productions, #direnayol had its world premiere on the 15th !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival. Currently he is working on his second feature hybrid documentary on queer grief practices from Turkey.

Ulaş Dutlu, born in Eskişehir in 1987, graduated from the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Eskişehir Osmangazi University and worked as a text writer for advertisement agencies for three years. Having worked as a boom operator in the cinema sector between 2011-2013, Ulaş Dutlu keeps on conducting studies on sound. He worked as a sound technician for the 2013 documentary titled “Diren Ayol”, a Turkish-German co-production. Voltrans is his first feature documentary film.

Her Story is a web series about two trans women in Los Angeles who have given up on love, until suddenly chance encounters give them hope. Violet is drawn to Allie, a reporter who approaches her for an interview, while career-driven Paige meets James, the first man she’s considered opening up to in years. Will they risk letting what they are stand in the way of being loved for who they are?

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Curator's statement Esra Özban and Esma Akyel:

“Trans women in the media have long been punchlines, killers, indications of urban grit, pathetic tragedies, and dangerous sirens. Rarely have they been complex characters who laugh, struggle, and grow, who share strength in sisterhood, who seek and find love. Her Story depicts the unique, complicated, and very human women we see in queer communities, and explores how these women navigate the intersections of label identity and love. Co-written by Jen Richards and Laura Zak, directed by Sydney Freeland (Drunktown’s Finest), with cinematography by Bérénice Eveno, and produced by Katherine Fisher/Speed of Joy Productions, Her Story features predominantly LGBTQ women, on and off-screen.”

Dr. Mijke van der Drift lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, the School for New Dance Development, and The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. They are currently preparing their book Nonnormative Ethics for publication. Mijke has been working internationally on Radical Transfeminism and is co-editor of the radical transfeminism zine. Mijke van der Drift's and Alex Reuter’s second film A Way of Dying... is currently on tour.

This movie rocked the foundations of the early indie film world. The provocative, thrilling classic is a fantasy of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social democratic cultural revolution. When Adelaide Norris, the black radical founder of the Woman’s Army, gets mysteriously killed, a diverse coalition of women – across all lines of race, class, and sexual preference – emerges to blow the System apart.

Newly restored in high definition on its 35th anniversary, Born in Flames is even more relevant in today's political climate. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with restoration funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation. 

The screening is followed by a discussion on queer feminist futures with AnouchK from TransFormations - Trans* Film Festival Berlin.

TransFormations - Trans* Film Festival Berlin is a biennial grassroots, community-focused festival organized by an exclusively Black and PoC trans*, two spirit, gender-non-conforming team. The festival strives to bring together a broad range of films, art works and performances from different geographies and contexts, in order to celebrate the legacies and visions of Black, Indigenous, PoC, poor and working class, disabled folks and migrants within the make-up of queer, trans* and inter pasts, presents and futurities.

In collaboration with TransFormations – Trans* Film Festival Berlin.

AnouchK, non binaire, is one of the 6 members of the TransFormations – Trans* Film Festival Berlin (TFFB) Team. The organizing team of Black & PoC trans*, two spirit, gender non-conforming people wants to make a change by creating and sustaining a space for intersectional films from (but not limited to) the perspectives of Black, Indigenous, PoC folks speaking about or from trans* and/ or gender-variant experiences.