Moviemento 30.05.2025 – 18:00

This program is a garden to explore with all your senses. The diversity of form, color, and scent found in flowers is mirrored in these films, traversing celebration and mourning, fantasy and archive. In Baradiya, a Talaandig-Manobo indigenous trans woman grapples with discrimination to uphold her community’s culture to become a babaylan (shaman) amid the destruction of her ancestral land in Bukidnon, Philippines. The Flowers Stand Silently presents a film archive of Palestinian wildflowers, questioning the role of imagery as both testimony and instrument of violence. Filament Fortune reflects on radical care and tenderness among HIV-positive people. Speaking Flowers, a Super 8 film, employs an abundance of flowers and fairy tale imagery, creating a jarring contrast between natural beauty and kitsch. Finally, in I am a flower, Sam, a transgressive artist and flower lover, spends their day at a spa with their mother, before his final performance act.

Baradiya

A Talaandig-Manobo indigenous trans woman grapples with discrimination to uphold her community’s culture to become a babaylan (Filipino queer shaman) amid the destruction of her ancestral land in Bukidnon, Philippines. This queer ecological story followers her life as she finds meaning in her ancestry and embraces her true destiny as the spiritual descendant of Baradiya.

Content Notes:
none
Gab Mejia, Miko Reyes, Datu Arayan, and David Loughran

Philippines, 2024

Binukid and Bisaya. Subtitles in English

30 min

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing

When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender essay film questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and land.

Content Notes:
none
Theo Panagopoulos

UK (Scotland), 2024

No dialogue. Subtitles in English

17 min

Filament Fortune

Filament Fortune offers poetic portraits of HIV+ folks ranging across the Americas, from Canada via Philippines, Brazil and Mexico. In place of documentary realism are video fragments, swimming idylls, and fantastical bouquets arranged over landscapes. Accompanying these sun-drenched frames are intimate and searing asides from La Jerry, Lírio Nascimento and the filmmaker himself. (Mike Hoolboom)

Content Notes:
none
Beau Gomez

Canada, 2024

Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, English. Subtitles in English

10 min

Speaking Flowers

Speaking Flowers is a Super 8 film ironically overloaded with flowers and fairy tale film motifs. A film that begins like a supposed color therapy when opulent carpets of flowers blend into one another and yet gradually begin to crack when the harmonious floral world turns into artificial flowers and other decorative kitsch made of plastic rabbits and empathetic plastic deer, which impute an innerdialogical ambivalence to us with calendar-like phrases and establish ever more obtrusively how exhausted we feel after all. Meanwhile, the film grows into an absurd fairy-tale movie theatricality in which the only apparently humanoid being itself is a flower that leads us more and more through the diffuse events and yet abandons us in a void of floral profusion - a floral superabundance in which it is never quite clear whether we are already in a swan song to the beauty of nature when the flowers ask themselves, "Am I the only one still alive?"

Content Notes:
none
Charlotte Maria Kätzl und Conrad Veit

Germany, 2023

English. Subtitles in English

18 min

I Am A Flower

Sam — a deviant artist and proud flower person — is spending one last day in a flower spa with his mother before his final performance act. Sam is fully turning into a flower, a decision hard to accept by his mother. On that last day, between over-the-top treatment and supposed relaxation, the two tries to converse, navigating between grief and love.

Content Notes:
none
Ariel Victor Arthanto

Germany, 2024

English. Subtitles in English

13 min