Surrender

Once a year, the Bulgarian tradition of Kukeri unites a small village as residents wear intricate masks and costumes and dance at night. Killian Lassablière chronicles the practice in his short documentary.

They follows two university professors over the course of a day. Lyudmil begins a new position at the university where Miho, the older chairman of the department, is busy juggling the social pressures of work and family. In the end, the two are seen living together as a couple, tender but cautious to keep their relationship secret.

A young Bulgarian man, riding the endless rollercoaster of workouts, anonymous sex, and dopamine, asks how to finally get off in a world where the body is everything. The film explores the obsession of queer men with their bodies as an object of desire, pleasure, and self-confidence and probes how the body is weaponized in fitness, sex, and hookup culture. Collecting footage from video games, 3D scans, online conversations, and archive footage of the ideal male body, the film asks if it is possible to completely detach from our bodies in this supersexual culture.

It is a documentary dance film revealing the harsh reality of LGBTQ+ persecution in the Chechen region of Russia. The contents of the film were inspired by testimonials of the arrests, torture, and blackmail that gay Chechens were subjected to throughout 2017.