As of May 15th, 2025 I am 66 years and around 250 days old.
Coming from a background of a working class family whose father was a crane operator in a steel
company working alternating day and night shifts all his life. On the weekends he worked as a taxi
driver to make ends meet. My mother was a housewife raising four children.
In retrospect I assume that they were not happy with their lives resulting in many disputes from
yelling matches to my mother attacking my father with a knife but mostly they were imprisoned in
their routines organising our daily life and keeping the family together. My father worked his ass
off and went to the local bar to drown his hopelessness. My mother would lay on the couch
reading Penny novels and was moody and depressed.
They never hurt their children but this is hard to compare as I don’t know the difference what it
would have been to grow up in a middle class family with caring parents being attentive to the
needs of their children. But what do I know about growing up in a middle class family and their
emotional hardships and traumas.
With the lack of cultural nourishment as we didn’t hardly have any books at home, the public
library and the cinema became my harbour of what?
Being lonely with my social class discriminations and my raising awareness of my sexual identity
which both couldn’t be addressed in no way to anybody at that time in the late sixties early
seventies in a small town in Western Germany I took refuge in a dream world of fairy tales and
legends found in the books from the public library.
In my teens I started fleeing to the next bigger city to go to the movies watching all kind of films. I
discovered the Independent Hollywood films of this era like Harold and Maude by Hal Ashby,
Liliana Cavani’s The Nightporter and followed the rise of Fassbinder and the works of Pasolini.
When I was 17 I saw his film Salo o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma. At this time the film had an age
restriction of 18 before it shortly after got censored in Germany and couldn’t been shown till the
censorship ban was officially lifted in 2022. The film left me puzzled and confused as what did
Rosa von Praunheim’s film Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er
lebt years before had done when I watched the film secretly on my little TV. His film endured
similar censorship attacks before the film premiered in 1971 at the International Forum of Young
Cinema in Berlin.
I don’t remember how I got the idea of becoming a filmmaker but soon after my High School
graduation I run away to Berlin, a city with more than one million inhabitants, seeking I don’t know
what. I left behind my shame, my anxieties, my confusion and depressions. I wanted to be a
filmmaker or revolutionary and ended up studying Sociology, Psychology and Education.
I found myself in a world that was strange and fascinating at the same time. An academic
institution which doesn’t care about your personal backgrounds and an underground world of the
Berlin nightlife where I could explore my sexual desires. In my studies I learnt about Marxist
theories which I hardly understood and met fellow students who had similar beliefs.
At the end of the seventies was a shortage of affordable housing in Berlin. Even more when you
wanted to live together with more people sharing your political ideas. After some months in New
York I moved into a squatted house in 1981 with 25 other people representing a variety of different
backgrounds. This was my first experience of living and working collectively.
I got involved with a group who had started screenings in another squatted house next to ours
where they showed films by filmmakers whose work was made without funding in Super 8, the
only possible way to afford to make independent films at the time. The cinema was called Eiszeit.
After two years we got evicted from our house by the police but me and the others were so
determined that we found another space where we continued our film programming and
screenings.
Kino Eiszeit became a place where we could present all possible forms of presentation of films,
music, theater, performances and parties. We run the space collectively and my dreams were to
enable those artists with the means in regard of filming equipment and mutual support to create
their work.
We founded a Super 8 filmmakers collective called OYKO and organised events in Kino Eiszeit,
Open Air screenings and gallery shows. All this efforts materialised in producing our first feature
film Kinder der Konfettimaschine which was funded by the then innovative department of the
public German TV station ZDF called Das kleine Fernsehspiel.
This was the start of my „producer’s“ career. Quickly I learned that even in an institution that
claimed to support young, emerging filmmakers that there are rules. We exceeded their rules and
we had to fight to have our film presented in its original form and vision. Luckily we succeeded.
After two more productions for this TV station, I decided to leave this hypocritical system behind
me.
Meanwhile I had been offered a job as a film curator at Hallwals, a multi-media art space in
Buffalo, New York. There I had my first meetings with then homocore punk filmmaker Bruce
LaBruce and his entourage. He approached with a project for a feature film after he had made
several short films in Super 8. I didn’t see myself as a producer at that time but I supported him
with a chunk of Dollars, earned through my regular job at Hallwalls. This project became the
infamous film No Skin off my Ass.
It was made on a shoe string budget and shot in Super 8 and then blown up to 16mm so that it
could be presented in festivals and cinemas. We all were surprised that after a screening in an
experimental section at the London Film Festival in 1991 organised by a friend of ours. Film critic
Amy Taubin of the Village Voice raved about the film and praised it as a film compared to the
works of Andy Warhol. This name dropping helped the film to its success. Despite the following
worldwide attention the film got it got a lot of criticism from the queer community for its
representation of a faggot falling in love with a skinhead. Especially in Germany they denounced
the film as glorifying male fascist masculinity in the role of the skinhead.
As I don’t want to bother anybody with more details of my biography being a producer of many
queer independent films and having worked at many film festivals as a programmer and having
founded several film festivals like the Porn Film Festival Berlin where I could show the films which
to me share my vision of queerness and politics my conclusion is:
The reason why me as an old sissy I find the creation of the Cinema of Disobedience so important
is that I don’t want to follow any rules. I don’t want to change any market rules. I want to define
my queerness, my political beliefs which are represented in the works I make, produce and
support. I see the Cinema of Disobedience as a global collective which supports each other to
create more and more films of disobedience. A first idea to make our already existing films visible
is that all New Queer Radicals can organise screenings, panels and discussions of exchange in
their cultural context and places. We all are disobedient.
Jürgen Brüning
May 15th, 2025