Month: August 2025

Dear World, accept me as the Disobedient radical filmmaker. I won’t fail You. I love action,
I love violence and no destruction. I love pornography when it’s giving. I even love myself.
I don’t want to be half of a person through a love affair. I don’t want business. I want
freedom. A total freedom to make my movies the way I imagine them. I don’t want control.
I don’t want war. I want cooperation and tolerance within. I want trust that is not money
based. And I want it now; we have nothing for granted. Not the Time, not the Future.
Presence is the given fact. Let me be as queer and radical I choose, I promise the same
in return.
The true rebel, Malga Kubiak

While I was shooting my film Janine zieht aufs Land (Janine Moves to the Country), I
thought about how, when I was twelve, my mother bought me a video camera, it having
become too dangerous for me to walk the streets of my village fully “dressed up.” My
mother was concerned for my bodily safety, but more than that she wanted me to be able
to develop my dissidence before it was nipped in the bud by some form of corrective
violence. She let me set up a kind of studio in my bedroom, where my accomplices and I
would stand strut our stuff for the camera, searching out identities beyond the confines of
prevailing notions and images. The recordings were screened within that small circle,
whose members then got inspired or motivated to take our actions further.
 
For my mother, this was simultaneously a strategy of resistance against her own
experiences of (family) violence, and a way to liberate herself from her father, who had a
fascist past. Her approach to bringing me up was an openly pursued protest against him,
who had seamlessly transitioned from a fascist system to a democratic one, while the
contradictions were kept from surfacing. The contradictions were always repressed.
 
Queer aesthetics makes no detours around these (sometimes unavoidable)
contradictions. Rather than simply adding queer characters to conventional narratives or
replacing straight characters with queer ones – even if that might be what the market
demands – my concern is with the fundamental approach to the way a story is told. Try as
I might, I can’t shake the feeling that the conventional structure doesn’t suit me very well.
But if that is so, I prefer to see it as an advantage, and to take on certain mechanisms
from which I’m at least subtly excluded. Somehow this aligns with the attitude and the
definition of “camp” – to be able to view things from outside and play with them, in order
to conjure up resistance.
 
Capitalist structures generate conformity. Nor can I myself operate outside those
structures; as I well know, opposing them is anything but easy. In a country where right-
wing, fascist thinking is on the rise again, including because – whether in the east or the
west – we’ve hardly reflected at all on its place in our own family histories, queer stories
ought not to make accommodations, let alone place themselves in a subordinate position
– no more than queer people out to subordinate themselves. Alarmingly, some gay
people are also joining the right-wing mob. Clear distinctions are being blurred. There is
no longer a good-against-evil schema (although ultimately, there never was one). Our
task is to do justice to a non-binary situation, to comprehend mechanisms in their
complexity, and even to allow ourselves the luxury of empathizing with our enemies.
The contradictory, camp aesthetic I’m interested in opposes the spirit of polarizing
simplifications and the clickbait calculus. Back then, when insults rained down on me
because I couldn’t be categorized, I would retreat to my room in order to draw strength by
performing for a small circle of people. Similarly, I want this attitude to continue to express
itself in my films today: anti-demagogical, in-your-face, but cheeky, and definitely camp.

I chose to present Unlearning to Sleep within the frame of the Cinema of Disobedience
because the film embodies an approach that resists market-driven expectations. It is not
a work made to reassure or to neatly resolve; instead, it invites the spectator into a space
of slowness, vulnerability, and drift.

The film was awarded Best Film at the Berlin Porn Film Festival (BPFF), which for me
underlines its connection to an audience willing to engage with cinema outside
conventional categories. That recognition confirmed the value of small, alternative
communities that meet works where they are, without demanding that they disguise
themselves in order to circulate.

The film was shot at home, on a phone, during the pandemic. Its “homemade” condition is
not an accident but a decision: to embrace precarious means and the raw textures of low
resolution, instead of aspiring to high-definition polish. I knew this was the only way for
the project to exist: without resources, outside of film labs, and with no chance of ever
being supported by institutional funds. This awareness made it necessary to assume the
aesthetics of precariousness, not as a limitation, but as a different path to making cinema
possible.

Showing Unlearning to Sleep here is a way of aligning with the idea that cinema can
refuse to be formatted by the market before it is even created. It is an experiment in
softness, in letting go, which is in itself a form of disobedience. Instead of providing
answers or slogans, the film allows space for uncertainty, for drifting in and out of
attention, for daydreaming. It is less about provoking shock than about insisting on the
right to imagine otherwise—even if that imagining takes the fragile, porous form of a
dream.