Hold

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?

Non-binary film maker Toni Karat invited queer and sex-positive people of the ‘Berlin porn bubble’ for this impressive documentary about narcissism and self-love. In authentic and touching self-reflective interviews ten protagonists who are as diverse as possible – lesbian, gay, queer, trans, non-binary and often over 50 – tell their sexual stories and contemplate their personal journeys and struggles. It’s an almost philosophical little masterpiece with a lot of honesty and authenticity on both sides of the camera.

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.

A woman is caught by a copy in the act of painting graffiti. She runs from the scene with the cop close behind. Perhaps the police officer knows her own fate when she sets off on the chase. Perhaps she succumbs to the will of the graffiti girl. Clearly, somebody needs to be punished.