LUST & ILLUSION

MQ Hof 8

MQ Arena 21

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International Short film programme | 1900 - 2023 | 65 min.

From fertility symbols and places of pleasure to ideas of paradise and oases of retreat. The short film programme undertakes a critical reflection and shrill twisting of the multi-layered meanings and linguistic metaphors of gardens. They reflect generative images of growth, beauty and harmony, as well as moments of irrepressibility and non-conformity. Films sift through the imaginations of gardens, appropriating them, turning them upside down and giving rise to wilful new interpretations. Surreal, courageous, extravagant and trippy.

La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy)
FR 1900 | D: Alice Guy-Blaché | 1 min.

At the origin of the feature film, the original metaphor of the garden: In a surviving version of the first fictional film in film history, Alice Guy-Blaché stages a garden in which a fairy harvests living babies from oversized cabbages, the French equivalent of the baby-bringing stork. A surrealistically funny piece of film history by an often forgotten film pioneer.

 

Venus in Ferns: A ballet of practical gardening lore
US 2023 | D: Laura Conway | 9 min.

Margaret Tulliver's 1919 book Venus in Ferns marks a key milestone in the development of the gardening advice genre and is unceremoniously re-interpreted and sexualised in this ballet satire: In a Victorian garden, Florence, author of a gardening column, teaches her protégés gardening tips and reproduces conservative, toxic gender concepts in ambiguous allusions. But as much as Florence endeavours to domesticate nature, the plant kingdom resists her interventions and continues to grow in an idiosyncratic and queer way.


27
HU/FR 2023 | D: Flóra Anna Buda | 11 min.

Alice is 27 years old, lives with her parents and is desperately looking for a place of seclusion and intimacy, alone and with others. While roaming the clubs at night, Alice creates a little paradise where her fantasies can take unexpected turns. But even in paradise, the pain of everyday life can sometimes spill over.

 

Flores del Otro Patio
CH/CO 2022 | D: Jorge Cadena | 15 min.

In northern Colombia, a community of queer activists denounces the exploitation and destruction caused by the country's largest coal mine. In the interweaving of performance and activism, they shift the constructed and hierarchised relationships between the categories of "human" and "nature": a blossoming resistance opposes a capitalist idea of growth.


Au Revoir, Jérôme
FR 2022 | D: Chloé Farr, Gabrielle Selnet, Adam Sillard | 8 min.

Jérôme misses his lover Maryline. In search of his lost love, Jérôme ends up in an above-ground paradise: Heaven is a garden, it soon turns out; a sprawling labyrinth full of creatures that can be asked about Maryline. A fable about loneliness and boxing gloves. The fantastic afterlife - relatable.

 

Tulip Opera
BE/FR 2023 | D: Marie-Sarah Piron | 4 min.

A gardener stands on his flowerbed and conducts each little flower with care and attention. The flowers, at first attentive and endearing, seem to follow his rhythm and join in his song. But in the euphoria of the crescendo, a mishap occurs - a tear! The tulips, in particular, take a liking to it and chuckle and make fun of the gardener, who now stands there with his shirt torn, while the plant orchestra around him takes control and transforms the bed into a madcap operetta.

 

Asparagus
US 1979 | R: Suzan Pitt | 18 min.

Originally shown as Midnight Movie together with Lynch's Eraserhead and recently rediscovered as part of the Nachtblende, Asparagus takes us into a nocturnal, surrealistic dream world: initially confined to dollhouse-like interiors, a woman approaches the garden of sexual and creative freedom that unfolds outside her window and envelops everything in a suggestively psychosexual tangle of asparagus, vines and flowers, transforming from one form into the next and growing right through the most intimate spheres into the cinema.