Paulita Pappel

A group in latex are hard at work to a beat that’s extra hot.

In the heat of a shimmering Berlin summer, Nora spends her days as a third wheel to her older sister Jule and her best friend Aylin. When Romy comes onto the scene, a friendship blossoms. Nora instantly falls for her, opening up a whole new world and unexpected summer of love.

It is the year 2060 and AIDS has been eradicated. However, in some, the HIV virus has now mutated into a gene from which a drug can be produced that has become the white powder of the twenty-first century. With a virtually supported scanning system, secret police are trying to identify anyone who carries this gene. Filmed in Berlin, Taiwan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s science fiction dystopia revolves around a struggle to gain control over the production and exploitation of bodily fluids. Her film is like an orgiastic opera; a breathless round of bodies, secretions, performances and sexual acts often performed in the service of an overriding economy. An unusual, largely experimental and deliberately parapornographic drama in which the borders between the sexes as well as homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans- or intersexual are constantly blurred.

A queer metaphysical love story that weaves itself through real and imagined sexual encounters across darkrooms, forest cruising zones and highway shoulders. In these fantastical playgrounds, bodies are free to imagine themselves in a multiplicity of forms as they encounter other bodies without preconceived notions of what those other bodies desire, what they will need, and how they should be touched. While trusting the energetic attraction of bodies towards each other and learning through the encounter, INSTINCT simultaneously asks: what does it mean for a queer body to actively (un)learn what it might assume about another body's sex, gender, and desire?

The imprint of the past is made present by the return of three migrants to a community in the upper Mixteca region of Oaxaca, where the three stories intersect.

With things growing a bit stale in the bedroom, lesbian couple Claudia and Dylan agree to seek sexual experiences outside their relationship. Dylan discovers new pleasures at a sex club, while Claudia, in drag as Claude, finds a surprising partner.

Liz walks between different rooms of the city. A bar, a toilet, a wasteland, a garden, a trailer. The cruising body can't, unlike the flaneur, be alone. She won't leave the world outside of her. Several eyes follow her: the women holding the cameras, the director. The director is sending her a love letter. The director needs her cruising body. They are a part of each others fantasies and share a dream about a city's possibility of providing safe sexy spaces. They travel together to look for the rooms in between, to find rooms of their desires.

Through post-porn, performance and wrestling, Puck tries to figure out her place in the world.