SHORTS
Retrospective 6: Against the Screen
Curated by Thomas Schallhart
What happens when the screen stops being a window and becomes a site of investigation? Who controls the image? Who profits from it? How can we steal it back? This program brings together films that turn the apparatus of looking back on itself, interrogating stock photography, surveillance, home movies and the desktop.
Content notes: mention of abortion
Sinema Transtopia
23.05.2026 – 23:30
Getty Abortions
What do abortions look like? What kind of images shape our view on them? And where do these images come from? The desktop essay “getty abortions” examines how German and Austrian media illustrate the topic of abortion, browsing through stock photos, teen magazines and documents of a real abortion experience. It jumps from the early 2000s to the late 19th century, seeks out feminist knowledge and chats with fictional characters. But one question remains: Why does no one look into the camera?
Director: Franzis Kabisch
Writer: Franzis Kabisch
Country: Germany, Austria, 2023
Language: English, Deutsch
Subtitle: English
Duration: 21 min
Blue Boy
Director: Manuel Abramovich
Country: Germany / Argentina, 2019
Language: German, Romanian
Subtitle: English, German
Duration: 19 min
Seven young men alone in a deserted bar with a film crew and the sound of their own voices as their only companions. This device allows the spectator to scrutinise the micro-movements that cross their faces, and it is all too tempting: what is one of the boys thinking when he hears the playback of how he touts his clients? What does another feel listening to his own account of meeting an older man when he was only sixteen? The scenes recounted by these escort boys plunge us into their secret reality, but once again, nothing is more intimate than the faces themselves. Each seems to more or less agree with what they hear, expressed in German or Romanian: at times, they seem proud, at times amused, at times troubled.
Hansa Boy etwas das kommt nie wieder vor
The Bürgermeister-Smidt-Brücke in Bremen, at the head of the Teerhof, spans the Weser to both banks, running through the heart of the German city-state. Mayor Johann Smidt was a well-known statesman in the first half of the 19th century. He is perhaps best known for founding Bremerhaven, a move intended to save the ailing Hanseatic city from the increasingly silted-up river. As a senator, he represented the city-state at the Congress of Vienna, where the new German Confederation took shape. Smidt took particular care to ensure that the determination of citizenship for Jews residing in the territory would remain a matter for the respective German states. His life’s work was to exclude Bremen’s Jews from social and political life. The Bürgermeister-Smidt-Brücke was named after Smidt in the wake of the inadequate denazification efforts following World War II. HANSA BOY ETWAS DAS KOMMT NIE WIEDER VOR addresses the bridge’s namesake directly. The film seeks to reveal the fate embedded within the unspeakable history inherent in the structure’s name.
Director: virgil b/g taylor
Writer: virgil b/g taylor
Country: Germany, 2021
Language: English, German
Subtitle: English, German
Duration: 11 min
A Certain Love For Symmetry
(Eine gewisse Liebe zur Symmetrie)
Of powerful women and suspicious triangles – but first we need some background knowledge.
Director: Marlene Denningmann
Country: Germany, 2019
Language: German
Subtitle: English
Duration: 8 min
the Sixty Nine Club
Now only a small handful of members, the Sixty Nine Club is Europe’s oldest social group for gay leathermen, founded in 1965 when homosexuality was illegal in Britain. Today the club’s last surviving older members take us through home movies and tales of debauchery, love and friendship.
Director: Rob Eagle
Country: United Kingdom, 2019
Language: English
Subtitle: English
Duration: 21 min
Barbès
Director: Randa Maroufi
Country: France, 2021
Duration: 6 min
