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Festival Program 2026Shorts 8: IF I CAN SMELL YOU FROM AFAR

SHORTS

Shorts 8: IF I CAN SMELL YOU FROM AFAR

This short film program explores longing and the challenge of overcoming distance, or how that distance sometimes remains. The Blue Sunshine Love begins with a familiar story: a tourist visiting Thailand, falling in love, and soon confronting complications shaped by class, sexuality, and geography. Working Class presents a fictional manifesto from Turkish construction workers, reflecting on how the market of desire fetishizes their bodies. In Jasmin That Blooms in Autumn, a quiet valley of affection unfolds between two elderly women in India, living in separate care homes yet connected through invisible, and sometimes fragrant, love letters. Casual animates one of the most debated questions in contemporary intimacy, especially among queer women: the blurred boundary between casual and romantic relationships, and how far one allows oneself to surrender to feeling. Our Joyful Endings appears as a confessional reflection on transmasculinity and sexual joy, recalling Catholic saint iconography while searching for a deeply personal sense of fulfillment. With its iconic sound effects and screens from Grindr, Cybersex19 brings us firmly into the present. Here, people across Brazil and beyond, including immigrants and men living on the down low, navigate distances shaped by borders, nation states, and their own desires. The program closes with Fresh As Daisy, leaving us with an open question. If the distances explored throughout these films could somehow be crossed, would closeness truly follow, or would we still remain just out of reach of one another?

Babylon Kreuzberg

31.05.2026 – 18:30

The Blue Sunshine Love (รัก…ฉันเหงาในเมืองใหญ่)

A 23-year-old indigenous gay man working on Khao San Road meets a Chinese tourist from England. As he gets to know the foreigner, he ponders his life, his family, and his future.

Director: Pakin Dumsee
Writer: Pakin Dumsee
Country: Thailand, 2025
Language: Thai/English
Subtitle: English
Duration:  30 min

Working Class (İşçİ Sınıfı)

A fictional manifesto by working-class men from Turkey who desire to be more sexually fetishized. Subverting nationalism with the tools of gay pornography, this essay film mocks today’s sexual caution and the art world’s romanticization of the lower classes. Scenes of demolishing buildings merge with the poetic view of a harbor under snow, paralleling the contrast between the aggressiveness of physical labor and the emotional vulnerability of hardworking men.

 

Director: Nadir Sönmez
Writer: Nadir Sönmez
Country: Turkey, 2025
Language: Turkish
Subtitle: English
Duration:  6.47 min

Jasmine That Blooms in Autumn

Love blossoms secretly between two elderly women at a senior care home while the spectre of patriarchy looms large overhead.

Director: Chandradeep Das
Writer: Rahul Roye, Chandradeep Das
Country: India, 2025
Language: Bengali, Hindi
Subtitle: English
Duration: 14:44 min

Casual (En Jeg Ser)

CASUAL is a sensual short about negotiations of intimacy in casual relationships. Two strangers wake up together in a sunny bed. They’re young, queer and enjoy the thrill of their casual fling. They have nothing to lose, but which is more vulnerable to share with a stranger – your sexual desires or romantic dreams?

Director: Kauli Green
Writer: Andrea Eiland Ohrt
Country: Denamrk, 2025
Language: Danish
Subtitle: English
Duration:  8:31 min

Our Joyful Endings
(Nos Fins Joyeuses)

Our Joyful Endings follows the diary of a trans-masculine person who sees his own and others’ views of his body change during his transition. Between desire, apprehension and questioning. From there, comfort grows with people who share this experience.

Director: La Fille Renne & Levon Babayan
Writer: La Fille Renne, Levon Babayan & Lou Mara
Country: France, 2025
Language: French
Subtitle: English
Duration:  6’07 min

Cybersex 19 (Cybersexo 19)

Based on the feature offered by dating apps that allows you to search for partners anywhere in the world, Cybersex 19 embarks on an exploration of the gay universe in the nine countries that kept their borders open to Brazilians during the pandemic.

Director: Chico Ludermir
Country: Brazil, 2025
Language: Portuguese and English
Subtitle: English
Duration:  9 min

Fresh as Daisy (ស្រស់ដូចផ្កា)

Two friends in their 20s, DA and SREAN, live in the same neighborhood and were each born into conservative families which never listen to them or encourage them to follow their own interests. They have bonded by privately discussing their family problems with one another.

Director: Socheata VAN
Writer: Socheata VAN
Country: CAMBODIA, 2025
Language: Khmer
Subtitle: English
Duration:  13:25 min

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