Category: Radicle Statements

What the fuck happened to queer cinema? A film tradition that has once given us Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Barbara Hammer and other iconoclasts is nowadays keen to assimilate with Hollywoodian banality and lukewarm romcoms. Ridiculous coming-of-age stories about provincial gays fitting in small town mentalities are all we see nowadays in endless, repetitive, unimportant LGBT film festivals around the world and especially the so called ‘west’. Is this a symptom of a broader decline of queer politics? Has pinkwashing and homonationalism fully taken over?

I refuse to accept that the netflixisation of queer narratives has signalled the death of queer cinema. The potential for queer films to challenge, enlighten and shock is still out there; we just need to go back to the basics. Back to the de(con)struction of cinematic languages, back to a full-frontal attack on hyper-capitalist 4K image clarity, the aesthetics of lookist body fascism and the supposed morality of happy gay families. Your assimilation has brought us nothing but misery and a nauseating gay and lesbian alt-right. We say no to the politics of homonormative visibility.

We are here to reclaim a cinema that is fragmented, disorienting, explosive, perverse, hysterical, contradictory, dirty, self-referential. A cinema made by actual communities of freaks and avant-garde weirdos. A cinema that dares to dream and scream.

I have never been very good at obeying rules. Filmmakers always ask me “How can you be so prolific?”
Don’t wait around for permission to make your films.
Never apply for grants or receive any government funding. A waste of time for a pittance and there is no such thing as a free lunch. Every cent you get comes with a catch.
Don’t have endless meeting with producers or production companies.
Never do any film “labs” (the kiss of death for any creativity).
Don’t think about markets or who your audience is.
Be true to yourself and your vision.
Use whatever means you have to make your films.
Don’t expect to make money, or to have a “career” as a filmmaker.
Filmmaking is a calling, something you must do.
Never compromise for money or for wider distribution.

The photos came first.
With Julia it was clear from the beginning that I had to photograph her.
Vice versa, it was also clear that she wanted to be photographed.
It confirmed her beauty – for all eternity!
Later the photos were a reassurance for her that she was still there; the photos were the
evidence: that she had lived and was still alive.
And in the end, they often enough seemed to be a reason or an excuse for someone to
come by and check on her: „When are we going to take photos again?“ was one of her
recurring questions.
Or was it the other way around?
Was I the one who needed reassurance we were still there?

It is a long story. – I’ll try to cut it short:

We’ve been around for quite a while.
At least since the sixties of the twentieth century, transsexuality has become
one of the most public secrets of Western societies. – Andy Warhol, for example,
writes in POPism, The Warhol 60‘s (Harvest, 1980):

„In the sixties, average types started having sex-identity problems, and some
people saw a lot of their own questions about themselves being acted out
by the drag queens. So then, naturally, people seemed to sort of want them
around – almost as if it made them feel better because then they could say to
themselves, ‚I may not know exactly what I am, but at least I know I‘m not a
drag queen.‘“ (aaO, p. 224)

Obviously, there is a strong need to look „behind the curtain“ and to catch a
glimpse of the ‚strange and mysterious world‘ of transsexuals. – Idiosyncrasy
and idealisation, lack of understanding and pity balance each other out.
But what unites the discourse on transsexuality in the past decades is the
fact that transsexuals have no voice in it.
It is likely that we can’t really change much about that.
But we have been here, and we want you to take note of that.

Johanna Jackie Baier
(September 2025)

I’m the fat and enthusiastic girl

who understands queerness

as a way of moving through the mycelium,

between radioactive roots

and underground fireflies.

The window in my room is queer,

the food is queer,

the dreams are queer,

and everything that comes from my mind is queer.

Each day I understand trends less and less—

they seem like empty expressions,

skinny and emotionally worthless.

I won’t minimize my mega-expression

in the face of a frightened heteronormativity

that kills, hides,

destroys, and discards

everything it can’t comprehend.

I’m on the side of forbidden fantasies that don’t harm,

and voluptuous encounters

that echo through every

landscape I’ve seen.

I’m on the side of all bodies.

I’m on the side of the disruptive force

of iridescent colors

and the evocation of the peculiar.

I find no peace

where there’s no risk,

because what I have rides

a carnival of emotion.

Perfection gives me more anxiety

than failure.

There are no hierarchies

in my world of wonders.

I can tell a fairy tale

with fat orgies,

I can turn a national hero into a drag king,

I can sing love songs

where everything happens

the way it does in my life.

My life on the margins.

My shamanic will

for pop rituals

at snack time.

Delicacies.

At the hour of devouring,

the baroqueness of humanity.

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.

In Thailand, there’s a darkly humorous saying with a suggestive undertone: “What do stubborn kids deserve?”—a phrase implying that those who disobey must be punished. Whether it’s being caned at school or violently beaten at home, such acts have become normalized in Thai society under the guise of discipline, obedience, and filial piety. But no matter the form of punishment, no one truly wishes to endure it.

Today, in my country, many young people are imprisoned for 3 to 15 years simply for demanding justice. Some are abducted, disappeared, or killed just for speaking the truth. In Thailand, there are countless truths that cannot be publicly expressed—especially through film. Those who attempt to defy this are branded as dangerous threats to the nation, as traitors lacking patriotism. Once, in the not-so-distant past, young men and women were burned alive in the heart of the city simply because they were “naughty kids” who dared to speak the truth. Even more horrifying is the fact that the truth about their deaths was forbidden to be told. Their stories were suppressed, their memories buried, and in some cases, they were posthumously branded as criminals who deserved to die.

This repression continues to this day. Along the northern border, many innocent people have been murdered and falsely accused of drug trafficking or human trafficking. In the southern border region, torture and fabricated charges are still used to persecute the innocent. Those in power manufacture violence and then accuse indigenous people of being terrorists, separatists, or traitors to the nation.

In Thailand, being a “good boy” means respecting, accepting, and glorifying military and authoritarian power. Even when these powers break the law, you are forbidden from questioning them. Instead, you are expected to worship these figures who cloak themselves in moral virtue, presenting themselves as the sacred center of faith—molding Thai society into a nation of blind nationalism, hostile to progress and to the knowledge systems of a modern world that values liberty and demands human rights, which have never truly existed in my country.

These are the reasons I continue to make films, even if many of them may never be shown in Thailand, with the little funding I manage to gather.

…This morning, I went to the hospital after breaking my arm while filming a new documentary in the southern border region. My medical records listed me as 51 years and 10 months old. And yet, I only truly awakened in the past 15 years. I wasted more than 35 years of my life trying to be a “good boy” in this country without a future.

Thunska Pansittivorakul
July 18th 2025

As a filmmaker from Taiwan, perhaps the most fascinating—and telling—aspect of this work is how politics interferes with queer cinema. This is not only a domestic issue; it reflects the broader dynamics of the entire Chinese speaking community.

Here at home, the power to determine which projects receive annual production funding rests in the hands of seven senior industry veterans. And even though Taiwan is the most progressive country in Asia regarding LGBTQ+ rights, the films that get made still overwhelmingly reflect mainstream political narratives. Queer stories, when told, must shimmer with hope and light. Otherwise, they’re reduced to “brotherly affection” — lingering glances labeled as platonic — crafted to fit the media’s obsession with general-audience ratings and box office returns. Queer desire, in this context, is entirely castrated.

When you zoom out and look at the political entanglements between Taiwan and China, this isn’t just about queer cinema. Any topic banned in China finds its only viable path in Taiwan through the aforementioned subsidy system. But look closer — this is a dead end.

You might argue that we’ve seen suppressed yet direct depictions of sexuality in the works of Tsai Ming-liang, or that Ang Lee laid the foundation for queer storytelling in this region. But I’m sorry to say: every independent artist fighting for space in queer cinema has had to carve out their own way of surviving. Forget pleasing politics — no one has the time to care about you now anyway.

This environment has only pushed me to more actively explore desire, class, and social consciousness — and in doing so, I’ve begun to explore myself. Before I speak of cinema disobedience, let me share just one piece of advice with whoever’s reading this bitter confession from an Asian gay man:

Be friends with those who like you.
That’s my only stance toward creation.

There’s no need to weep your way into pleasing everyone. Want everything? You’ll end up with nothing.

I am Pina Brutal, alias Brutal Cunt= where I come from Pina is a slur for female genitalia, and I
wear this name with a pride no Hungarian can stand.
They can not call me Pina, because their shame would burn them, and that is where I shine.
Fuck shame.
Growing up, I did not know what queer was, and what freedom it would mean to me to identify as
such.
There was nothing available in my environment that would have informed me, and so I just learned
that I am somehow different. And different is bad, so it must be hidden.
And so I pretended, participated in the demanding body art performance that is being a “woman”.
Till I got so tired, lonely, and sad, that there was no other way than to leave my country and start
anew. Fast forward 10 years, I changed shapes and presentations like a snake changes its skin, I
was bald-head, I was a hard femme, I was a stripper and sex worker, I was an extreme body
artist, I was a bondage bunny, I was an artist, a nude model, a tattooed bad bitch covered in
scars, a pornographer, but mostly I was a person boldly wearing the many identities given to
them.
Queer to me means the absolute, radical freedom to be what you are, without shame and
apologies, to choose the people you want to be with and form a community stronger than
imaginable.
Queer is freedom and it is revolution, and if we wish to survive it is also the future.
Queer is to say NO. NO to the unlivable. NO to the often systematic hatred that prosecutes,
exploits, and threatens the queer, the artist, the immigrant, the differently abled, the dark-skinned
body.
As an artist, a person, a soul, a leopard, I will not follow the rules in life. I will not follow the rules of
art and filmmaking. I will not fit in. I will not obey.
I am a proud and brutal Cunt living life and my art will mirror my experience, which is somewhat
personal, and somewhat universal.
What can I say, EAT ME.