Birte Gerstenkorn

A sparse room with a single power plug. The jewel: a copy machine. Leather, metal, fur. A place where you don‘t sit squarely at a table with flowers and a salt shaker, but where you explore all dimensions of the space. Unwielding forms. Between 1981 and 1996, the lesbian-run „Pelze Multimedia“ in West Berlin was a beloved and notorious venue for experimental art and music, for sex parties, bar nights and avant-garde fashion shows staged on a scaffolding. Interviews with three of the showrunners are intertwined with private archive materials. SUBJECT SPACES explores the memory of a subculture, the question of feminist heritage and an aesthetic practice that stood in stark contrast to large parts of the women‘s movement at the time.

Air To Breathe is a film about a group of militant workers inside the Opel car plant in Bochum, Germany. The group was founded in 1972, initially with the help of revolutionaries from the 1968 movement. For over 40 years, the group fought for better working conditions inside the plant. Over time, their incessant rank-and-file activism made the workers in Bochum the most radical in the entire German metal sector: Opel Bochum saw several wildcat strikes, and a persistent and successful fight for the reduction of daily working time. The group even attempted to build up direct links between different workforces of General Motors in Europe to fight back against the raise to the bottom of wages and working conditions in a situation of worldwide competition for investments amongst GM plants. Their activities culminated in a six days wildcat strike in 2004.

„Sookee - Von Seepferdchen und Schränken“ is an intimate portrait of Sookee, a queer-feminist rapper and activist, who has been fighting sexism, homophobia and racism in German hip hop culture.

She was a muse, model and performer – a star, dazzling and intense. Lady Shiva managed to rise from street prostitution to the top. She lived in the fast lane and died tragically young. Her dream was to become a singer. With her companions, we trace her life during a vibrant time that kindles a yearning and provokes until today. The story of a woman’s meteoric fate and a great dream. An irrepressible desire for freedom in all its beauty and destructive force - and a stirring friendship and love.

Rainbow's Gravity is a cinematic study on the Agfacolor-Neu colour film stock made in Nazi Germany. Along its three layers of emulsion, the film digs deep into the escapist colourised landscape of this time and asks for the material requirements, retentions and ideological continuities of the Agfacolor palette. The film sequences, projected in the former production line, dismantle not only themselves, but also our view accustomed to historicise. The film tries to realise, not only how it had been - in the darkrooms of the Agfa film factory - but also how it can be possible at all to face this reality today within film, in images and movements without a final or even conciliatory view of the past.