Category: Radicle Statements

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.

I find the Cinema of Disobedience a relevant and urgent collective in the political and cultural landscape of 2025.

As fascism rises once again around the world, art becomes an increasingly crucial element in society for self-reflection and sanity checks.

Cinema is a storytelling medium that taps deeply into people’s emotions and subconscious. It is no surprise that fascist regimes attempt to control it, use it for propaganda, and suppress its freedom and critical role in society.

Targeting marginalized groups and labeling them as the enemy within, as is currently happening to queer people in neo-fascist countries, is a call to arms for artists and filmmakers. We must use our tools and talents to break through oppressive walls and reach audiences with the truth of human kindness and compassion.

As fascism creeps into our industry, we must remain vigilant and resist submitting to its destructive values and lethal market mechanisms.

I find hope in the Cinema of Disobedience to act as a lighthouse for artists and filmmakers around the world, shining light on urgent films that struggle to find an audience in the tumultuous sea of intellectual numbness imposed on us by the fascist pirates who have freebooted our freedom and pride.

Amir Ovadia Steklov

Berlin, 2025

We are all striving for something, and while we do it for subsistence, others do it for
consistence. Thus, the sense of crisis is extensive, whether you are at the center of it
all, or out in the margins, like most of us, and if you don’t perceive it, it is because
you’re probably senseless.

It was precisely at the margins of the Rotterdam Fest, last winter of 2025, after a very
much politicized panel regarding the current state of affairs in queer filmmaking
(moderated by M. Molineaux), that we came across the possibility of a strategic group
of sorts that would assert us against what I had just referred to as “market fascism”.
And as this term would later prove to be controversial within our own group, I will
take a few lines to expand on it.

During our Rotterdam panel interventions, the debate veered toward how LGBT+
identities were being targeted by extremist politics as a scapegoat for late capitalist
maladies. The president of my country, an exponent of this trend, just a few days
before, at the Davos Forum, had not only equated homosexuality with pedophilia, but
also pointed at our equality agenda as one of the reasons for the stagnation of western
economies, if not the main.

To what extent public manifestations like these may be called “fascist” is a question
we ask ourselves every fucking day in our country. Where does fascism begin?
When? Could it be, as in an Orwellian neo-language, that fascism is now a matter of
degrees? In order to count these degrees, we could measure the intensity of things like
public threats to artists and the scapegoating of minorities; their life or death
consequences determining whether we may be hence in front of a full-fledged
fascism, whose higher degree would, of course, be the advent of a genocide.

The graduation of different intensities of fascism may also explain the passive
acceptance facing authoritarism’s new encarnations, an enerving realization once we
remember how fascism was historically allowed by those who remained silent in a
time when past western democracies were also under chronic economic distress. And
the role of cinema and its derivatives, the network of audiovisual narratives
interwoven for global attention, do you think is not indifferent to the anomie that
precedes this state of affairs?

As an artist and also as an Argentine, me, myself, I firmly believe this, witnessing
how our government not only vindicates the genocides that ravaged our country, but
also fosters the transition of the popular mood from initial silent support to the
outright hatred towards the portions of society that systematically targets with its
dehumanization campaigns. It is up to you if you think that we, as media artists, have
nothing to do with it, either by action or by omission, but everything I’m doing, since
I grasped it, is guided by this awareness. You may deride it as some kind of epyphany
if you wish, my own road to Damascus. I don’t mind.

I also believe that there’s no innocent connection between political neoconservatism
and formal neoclasicism. The synchronicity between the enthronement of US-
American neoclasicism with Reaganomics forty years ago; the recent alt-right

preeminence with the progressive erasing of the market share for most revolutionary
narratives, and the association of the resulting inability of many younger generation
enthusiasts to assimilate disruptive language structures (something that was
commonplace for their grandparents), with the easy acceptance of bigotry as a most
suitable way of revolting on the one hand, or the impotent disbelief of doing anything
of significance to avoid it, on the other one. Because art shapes consciences, you
know? It does.

Our artistic quest should be the restoration of a revolutionary faith, not only while
producing art, but also when making it known, getting it discussed, getting it read
even beyond their makers’ intentions, towards the common construction of a shared
future. And that’s also art in the making, and we are all part of it. Individualism is the
greatest scam of our age. Let’s get out of it as fast as we can! An authoritarian wave as
global as the one we are headed into should not be faced individually if we don’t want
to fall into discouragement. As little as the scale of our own actions may appear when
measured separately, they can grow to heroic significance when perceived into a
wider, collective epic to defeat the rising dark forces.

Many cis-het pals relativize our radicalization as limited to our queerness, as if this
was leaving them aside. But you don’t have to shove a dick up your ass to realize that
there are more important things at stake. If the queer crowd is one of the minorities
that’s being targeted, what’s wrong with our radicalization? We are not leaving anyone
out of the discussion by doing so! Why should we do such a dumb thing when all we
are aiming for is to build bridges towards higher confluencies? Our best
accomplishment would be the opening of portals for a decolonized pluriverse of
identities that may defy the close market logic that hovers over the homogenization of
world audiences!

The original goal we had when we first planned this venture, was a joint premiere of
our films at venues that wouldn’t be interested in programming us if we asked them
individually. Our films were apparently very different from each other, but we shared
the experience of creating outside the cannon and a common worry against rising
fascism, coming to the idea that this could foreshadow a tendency among modern
filmmakers that may spark some notice.

But soon we were making bigger plans, because, you know?, this is what happens
when people interact at a human level, exchanging the little we have: our experience,
faith, and the possibility of inspiring a different way to practice the craft of movies,
away from the all-pervading squareness that has not only stripped screens of most of
its cultural diversity, but that is emptying the venues of bored spectators as well. Such
an alternative is possible. It doesn’t matter if we are not the ones that individually
fulfill it in the first place. This idea has to be repeated until understood by most: it
could be different. It can really be better, get it? Miraculously so…

Goyo Anchou
Buenos Aires, May 25th 2025

I was queer since I was born.
Raised by women.
Fear and fantasy kept me in the shadows for a long time.
Singing songs in full make up for my grandma in the little house full of animals.
First lover when I was 12.
Editing life with my eyes.
Life is a movie since then.
Second lover when I was 31.
So I am slomo a bit, you see.
Mystery is my third lover I get along with so good.
I feel like Inland Empire, I guess because I’m 47 now.
My inspirations are: Lynch, Del Rey and Aglio Olio.
Not pussy, pizza, pasta.
I loath heteronormativity to the bone,
till I’m sick and I cry.
I realized that in togetherness
there is a flame I need.
Only now I found love and care
in entanglements with you.
I have this feeling that with you mountains falling.
And it makes me wanna dance
not in the shadows.
X,
W

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