Category: Radicle Statements

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.

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