La Révolution des coordinatrices d'Intimité (Sex Is Comedy)

Short

An African musician meets a charming courtesan in a small French seaside town for a rare and secret moment of intimacy.

Short

Fanny is a bookseller by day and a soft-hearted person the rest of the time. In love with her friend Louise and to repress the sadness of this impossible love, she has a series of one-night stands with uninteresting men. One evening, she invites Louise to a literary gathering she's hosting. Fanny may be about to have a bingo.

Short

A very powerful short animated film on what it means to be a queer person in a cisheteronormative society.

Featurein cinema

In a fraught exchange between Leipzig and Strasbourg, Fanny and Lena warm to each other while the situation around them heats up. As it gets harder to parse fact from fiction, too much trust and not enough, they look to protest movements to teach them what out-of-control adults cannot. Writer-director Claire Burger’s nuanced drama is bracingly of-the-moment, capturing topical issues with a foreboding sense of longing and imminent disaster, and inspiring fiery performances from her leads, including Nina Hoss as a mother undone. After an initially cold reception from Lena (Josefa Heinsius) when she arrives in Germany, 17-year-old Fanny (Lilith Grasmug) will do anything to ingratiate herself with her prickly pen pal. Chocolate-covered shrooms, sexual experimentation, bonding over Antifa and black bloc protest movements—each attempt at connection becomes more daring than the one before, their “Franco-German friendship” mirroring the heated clashes of our time. When the school exchange is flipped, and Lena is now the fish out of water in France, giving into the attraction sizzling under her animosity will mean coming to terms with a world tearing apart at the seams and the fantasies built up to survive it.

Short

One afternoon, three high school students sneak out of their all-girls Catholic boarding school. Sunny, the new girl, has gone for a swim in the river. Sarah is eager to join her, even though Clémence disapproves.

Featurein cinemavirtual exclusive

The central comma rivening the title signifies the split down the middle of this concise, incisive diptych. And reflects how Rome-based musician Ondina, like the legendary hero Orpheus, is gripped by a need to look back at her lost love—sad, beautiful Alexia—across the gap of time. Euridice, Euridice is a realist tale told in a mythic mode, its mirrored love stories woven through with imagery of ceaseless ocean waves and an inauspicious snake slithering, of bathing women winding among one another like water nymphs. And of Alexia (Sarantopoulou) reaching towards Ondina (Quadri) from beyond the divide, coaxing Ondina closer to or away from Daria (Menichetti), who wishes to dance away with her arrested heart. Also in this prgoramme : LA RIVIÈRE ÉLISE LEVY | FRANCE | 2024 | 15 MIN | FRENCH EST One afternoon, three high school students sneak out of their all-girls Catholic boarding school. Sunny, the new girl, has gone for a swim in the river. Sarah is eager to join her, even though Clémence disapproves.

Documentaryin cinemavirtual exclusive

Tegan Quin (of Tegan and Sara fame) has been the victim of identity theft and an ongoing catfishing scam for over 15 years. While investigating, she shares for the first time how she was ensnared in toxic fan culture that revealed the dark side of fame. As one of the most influential queer indie rock bands of their generation, Tegan and Sara worked hard to cultivate an inclusive and passionate fanbase around the world. Fans were drawn to the duo’s beautifully confessional lyrics and found within the community a safe space be queer during a time when few bands would declare allyship, let alone celebrate their own queer identity. But Tegan and Sara’s world turned upside down when Tegan’s personal files were hacked in 2011 and weaponized by a bad actor in a complex catfish scheme to ensnare members of this community. Told through Tegan’s own voice, the voices of deceived fans, a trove of communications between fake Tegan and their victims, and the visual history of the band’s behind-the-scenes archive, this documentary feature is a thriller, a caper, a whodunnit, and an intimate personal journey rolled into one.

Featurein cinemavirtual exclusive

Émilie lives in a world of surveillance: her camgirl work; the camera phone lingering on a crush from afar; the headset affording her a drone’s perspective. The same drone that stalks each move she makes, offering inspiration, noting rivals. An unsolicited companion conspiring with or against her. A financially strapped transplant now living in the Paris suburbs, Émilie (ballerina Marion Barbeau) is thrust into a high-powered world when she is chosen for a renovation workshop with a prestigious architect (Cédric Kahn). Her classmates come mostly from “filthy rich” backgrounds, like cocky Olivier (Stefan Crepon), who wants Émilie as his conquest. But Émilie has shy eyes only for self-sufficient Mina (Eugénie Derouand), whose music builds like a “helicoid.” All along, a drone—unlike any known model—is watching her. Waiting for her next move and paying handily for the privilege. Taking the “killer’s point of view” made famous by films like Psycho and Friday the 13th to new heights, visionary director Simon Bouisson’s kinetic debut feature is a morality puzzle wrapped in a cutting-edge, goosebump-raising tech thriller. Getting us to consider: how complicit are we—as individuals, as a society—in our own undoing?

Featurein cinemavirtual exclusive

DUTCH • FRENCH ST | Capturing the recklessness of youth and the excitement of newfound sexual liberties in sensuous black-and-white cinematography, Dennis Alink’s Out offers up a vivid and tender tale of being young and gay. Tom (Bas Keizer, in a star-making performance) and Ajani (an effervescent Jefferson Yaw Frempong-Manson) are closeted secondary school sweethearts who yearn for life outside of their small-minded, rural community in the Netherlands. Their solution is Amsterdam, where the queer scene is thriving and they can work at their dreams of becoming filmmakers. Quickly falling into the Dutch capital’s gay nightlife offers the pair some initial thrills: cheeky games of Never Have I Ever, limo rides across the city, eye-opening trips to the bathhouse. But the challenges quickly follow, pushing them to separately question: “Who am I, and where do I fit in?” Recalling such classic monochromatic films about wayward youth as The Last Picture Show and Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche, Alink and his queer collaborators present a lived-in, piercing portrait that proves coming out isn’t just a pronouncement of one’s sexuality, it’s a simultaneously joyous and heartbreaking journey of self-discovery.

Short

At nightfall, the boxers of the La Frapppppe collective are training in a park in Marseille. Bodies are set into motion and start shaping a community of gestures, sensations, and emotions.