Rosa von Praunheim
Rosa von Praunheim has made 150 films and repeatedly provoked the middle-class to homophobic majority society. But he doesn't spare his own community either by accusing many gays of being conformist soft-spoken people; and by outing some prominent homosexuals against their will, he has made many enemies. For the younger generation of LGBTIQ activists, Rosa von Praunheim is still known as a figure from the early phase of the queer movement, but as a white cis man he hardly gets a hearing there. However, Rosa does not want to argue and theorize, but above all to live out his creativity. Sometimes narcissistic, sometimes angry and combative, sometimes anxious - and always with his own style. Companions such as the comic book creator Ralf König, the producer Regina Ziegler and the New York publicist Brandon Judell pay tribute to the artist and activist Rosa von Praunheim, who calls himself a “lucky child” because he was mostly able to do what he felt like doing.
Lars, a male nurse from Saarbrücken, moves to Berlin with his lover, Roland. They begin to renovate an apartment and their happiness seems almost complete. What Roland doesn’t know is that, while secretly checking out Berlin’s night life, Lars is also experimenting with a deadly poison.
Gay men love operas. Is that a stereotype? Markus Tiarks and Rosa von Praunheim try to find out.
In this docudrama Rosa von Praunheim looks into Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s sexual orientation, especially into his erotic experiences during his travels in Italy. Contrary to the common belief, von Praunheim argues that Goethe was not a heartbreaker and conqueror after all. It was only in Italy, that he had diverse sexual experiences, not least with men. Von Praunheim bases his assumption on letters written by Goethe to his friend Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi about these sexual encounters. Some of the content of these letters is re-encated in the film. At the same time, historians and linguists analyse and classify the letters into their historical context.
MY WONDERFUL WEST BERLIN recounts the lives and struggles of gay men in West-Berlin. Through present-day scenes and never before seen archival footage, a fascinating picture emerges of a city, that today characterizes itself as a dream destination and place of refuge for gays.
About Stefan Stricker, who calls himself Juwelia and has been running a gallery on Sanderstraße in Berlin Neukölln for many years. Every weekend he invites guests to shamelessly recount from his life and to sing poetic songs written with his friend from Hollywood Jose Promis. Juwelia has been poor and sexy all her life, has always struggled for recognition, but only partially.
Documentary about the Berlin-based organization ACT and its unusual educational program. Founded by former schoolteacher Maike Plath and two other women, ACT’s aim is to motivate students with troubled backgrounds and to help them learning by engaging them in a drama class.
Desire Will Set You Free is a feature film that explores life in contemporary Berlin with an often critical and sometimes humorous eye. Based on a true story, the plot follows the relationship of an American writer of Israeli/Palestinian descent and a Russian aspiring artist working as a hustler, offering access to the city's vibrant queer and underground scenes while examining the differences between expatriate and refugee life. Our characters travel through Berlin's layered history and unique subcultural landscape; on their adventures they discover influences and remnants of the Weimar Republic, WWII, the Bowie years, and punk.
Half documentary, half docu-drama about a German karate champion, who used to be a successful pimp...
How I Learned to Love the Numbers is a New York film and at the same time the study of a young man suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The Berlin filmmaker Oliver Sechting (37) and his co-director Max Taubert (23) travel to New York with the idea of documenting the art scene there. However, the project is quickly overshadowed by Oliver's OCD, and the two directors fall prey to a conflict that becomes the central theme of their film. Encounters with such artists as film directors Tom Tykwer (Cloud Atlas), Ira Sachs (Keep The Lights On), and Jonathan Caouette (Tarnation) or the transmedia artist Phoebe Legere seem more and more to resemble therapy sessions. At last, Andy Warhol-Superstar Ultra Violet succeeds in opening a new door for Oliver.
Two actors improvise biographical scenes about Hitler and Jesus. They discover more and more similarities and set out in search of the reasons for their enormous success. Jesus wants to give love. Many conflicts have to be resolved until Hitler can finally come to accept this.
A documentary about a women who was one of the first to start the fight against AIDS.
The filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim remembers his humble origins from the unglamorous district of Frankfurt Praunheim.
A youth in middle of self-discovery, offending with his father, just discovering his sexuality and hiding it again. A boy who's often lonely loses a loved one and is in love with the wrong one.
You may not recognize the name Ralf König, but you probably recognize his art. One of the most commercially successful German comic book creators, he is best known for books like “SchwulComix (GayComix)” that offer a twisted take on queer culture. Equal parts Tom of Finland and R. Crumb, König’s comics are sexually charged and often politically incorrect, portraying daily routines of gay life alongside serious subjects like AIDS. King of Comics is a touching portrait of a cutting-edge artist with a wicked sense of humor. All hail the king! —Jimmy Radosta
Five German directors celebrate the influence that famed filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim has had on their careers in honor of his 70th birthday. After discussing Praunheim's inspiration, each protégé presents an original short drawn from the experience.
Documentary about the current hustler scene in Berlin. Experienced its world premiere of the film at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival in Berlin. Based on interviews with former and active prostitutes the realities of male prostitutes in Berlin are treated. The film is value-free, objective, and records the hustler scene as a social Submilieu, which is characterized by both tragic fates, as well as everyday things and routines. Not only the direct sale of sexual services is discussed, but also other aspects associated with male prostitution: poverty, drug addiction, AIDS, crime, migration, love and partnership.
Werner Schroeter was one of the most significant proponents of New German Cinema. Schroeter was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In her film, Elfi Mikesch, who photographed a number of Schroeter’s films and who collaborated closely with him to create his vision, provides us with an intimate insight into Schroeter’s artistic output during the remaining four years of his life.
In this filmic memoir, German director Rosa von Praunheim returns to New York, a city he knew and loved in the woolly 1970s, to see what he might find and also to check in on the colorful protagonists of his 1989 documentary, Überleben in New York. Both a personal journey and a historical survey, New York Memories captures a transformed city by charting the shifting course of gay life, from Warhol Factory figures to the AIDS ravaged, within it.
A German documentary studying concepts of hell developed over time in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, often overlapping -but not in Catholicism- with purgatory. Special attention goes to 'physical' methods of torture in the afterlife, as in Dante's Inferno. Their inspiration stems partially from judicial torments, as used during the Inquisition to redeem 'Satanic' sinners, from witches and heretics to mere gay people. Also treated is hell's theological and 'educational' meaning.
As a result of the Holocaust and later, AIDS, the male homosexual community has sustained bitter losses and, according to Praunheim, lesbian women have now placed themselves at the head of the so-called queer movement. The female protagonists in the film represent two different generations; they also incorporate the past and present status of homosexuals in society.
Filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim searches for his biological mother after discovering late in life that he was adopted.
“This film is part of a series of films on gay men who survived the Nazi era. I met Walter Schwarze when he was already in his eighties. My camera recorded his first public account of his five-year incarceration as a homosexual at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was in his fifties when he met Ali in his hometown of Leipzig; the two men became partners and remained close until his demise. And yet, Walter told me, he felt he had lived in vain because he had not had the good fortune of today's gays, who are able to grow up in freedom. Walter Schwarze died of cancer on May 10, 1998.” Rosa von Praunheim
The film focuses on gay men who align themselves with hard-core right wing views, skinheads and Nazis. Rosa von Praunheim stated of the subjects featured in the documentary, “Some may be shocked that I do not take a stand in my film and do not portray gay neo-Nazis as monsters, but as people living their lives in dramatic contradiction.”
A retelling of the events that led to the death of Bernd Juergen Brandes. Brandes responded to Armin Meiwes' Internet ad in 2001, where Meiwes indicated that he was looking for a man willing to be killed and eaten.
Documentary portrait of German production designer Albrecht Becker.
Bosom buddies BeV StroganoV, Ovo Maltine, Ichgola Androgyn and Tima die Göttliche are four Berlin drag queens who met in the mid 1980s. These four queens became Germany's most popular drag performers and have been busy fertilizing the German cultural scene. Besides being performers, they are also political activists - in AIDS awareness, anti-gay violence, the sex workers movement and the struggle against the extreme right and racism. The film tells their story.
German iconoclast filmmaker and gay-rights activist Rosa vonPraunheim examines his own life and career in the documentary Phooey Rosa! With a quickly paced editing style, the film is a mix of personal banter, candid interviews, and clips from his filmography. It also includes footage from his early film Bed Sausage to his later work Neurosia. At the age of 60, vonPraunheim reveals intimate details about his past relationships and his childhood growing up after WWII. He also implicates some of his friends and inspirations, including Luzi Kryn and Rainer Kranach.
An essay film in which filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim interviews "the willing victims of Rainer Werner Fassbinder."
The life story of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a German Jew, who as a physician established the field of sexology, and fought militantly against German anti-sodomy laws in the late 19th century. The script reveals main characters in Hirschfeld's life including impossible love interest Baron von Teschenberg, and Hirschfeld's aids- young Karl Giese and guardian angel, the transvestite Dorchen, as they establish the First Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin in 1920, and follows their struggles to keep it open, up to the rise of the Third Reich in the mid 1930s.
A newly arrived guest of a Hollywood hotel charms and amazes the regulars, and they decide to invite him to their Christmas dinner.
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
I Was a Jewish Sex Worker is a humorous, no-holds-barred autobiographical film about the director’s former career as a sex worker and his relationship with his Jewish family. From graphic, erotic massages to a revealing interview with his grandmother, Roth tells a unique tale and explores themes of sexual wellness, connection and self-realization. Featuring guest appearances by German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim and sexologist/performer Annie Sprinkle.
Transexual Menace takes its title from the name of "the most exciting political action group in the USA"—transgendered people who are defining themselves, demanding their legal rights, and fighting for medical care and against job discrimination. Considered by von Praunheim to be the “most fascinating [project] in my long life as a filmmaker,” Transexual Menace is a sensitive and carefully crafted portrait that deals with issues openly and honestly. “I was able to earn the trust of many who are often reluctant to be interviewed. Courageous people talked to me, who transitioned in such problematic professions as law enforcement and firefighting.” Transexual Menace gives viewers remarkable insight into the home and work lives of transexuals from many cultures and countries, including female-to-male transexuals and those with families and children.
Neurosia is the autobiography of the director Rosa von Praunheim. The movie begins with Rosa presenting his autobiography in a movie theater. Before the film begins, he is shot. But - his body gets lost. A female journalist from a TV station begins researching the life of Rosa. In the course of the movie she speaks to lots of aquaintances, shows short clips from Rosas old movies. Her main aim is to provide sensational and shocking details from Rosas life. It turns out that nearly everybody had some reason to kill Rosa. At the end of the movie, she discovers Rosa at a boat where he is kept prisoner by some of his old enemies. She frees him, and the movie ends.
The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazi reign and the repression of the Communists as a trans woman and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.
Rosa von Praunheim interviews gay actor Kurt von Ruffin, Berlin-based promoter Harry Toste and activist Andreas Meyer-Hanno.
Although too long by half, this documentary is subtitled "A Trip Through Lotti's Life" and that is essentially what it is. Although done in a style that keeps you guessing what is true and what isn't about her life -- everything from her Aryan lover and her stay in a concentration camp while he is killed for their forbidden love -- it is a fascinating look at this remarkable woman through the eyes and viewfinder of Rosa Von Prauheim.
This film powerfully documents New York City's gay community's response to the AIDS crisis as they are forced to organize themselves after the government's failure to stem the epidemic. Activists who are interviewed include playwrite Larry Kramer, People With AIDS Coalition co-founder Michael Callen (who died of AIDS in 1994), New York filmmaker and journalist Phil Zwickler, as well as representatives from ACT-UP, Queer Nation and the Gay Men's Health Crisis.
Directed by Rosa von Praunheim.
In modern-day Berlin (1987), Frau Kutowski goes insane, believing herself to be the (real-life) notorious Anita Berber, a nude art dancer/drug addict/scandalous figure of post-WWI Berlin. (Berber died of tuberculosis in 1928, having achieved significant success and recognition throughout the dance world.) Frau Kutowski is placed in a mental hospital, where in her own mind she acts out Berber's final days, including in her fantasies the hospital's staff and patients, to represent Anita's friends and associates.
A portrait of three remarkable women who were once celebrated figures in the German cultural scene: film star Dolly Haas, dancer Lotte Goslar and artist Maria Ley, Erwin Piscator's widow
A Film by Rosa von Praunheim Nurses on the night shift roll dice to see which AIDS patient will die next. The owner of a gay bathhouse gets Kaposi's Sarcoma but tries to keep his mind on profits. An epidemic victim is harassed by a reporter on his death bed - he sticks her with a contaminated syringe. The government opens a quarantine called Hell Gay Land. Gay terrorists kidnap the Minister of Health. A black comedy filled with everybody's worst fears, A Virus Knows No Morals is Rosa von Praunheim's most controversial film to date: a savagely funny burlesque on the AIDS crisis. Irreverent yet deadly serious, the filmmaker covers just about every aspect of AIDS and its effects, as well as the rumors surrounding it. Since the 1960's von Praunheim has produced a provocative body of underground films, making him one of the New German Cinema's most original artists. "Brave and Vicious - Armed Camp!"
Shot in a neo-expressionist style, the film is a satire on cults of any kind. The plot follows Frankie and Hannes, a young gay couple living in Berlin. One is studying art and the other medicine. Their happy life is disrupted when Frankie attends a lecture and quickly becomes involved in a sinister cult operating as a self-help group called “Optimal Optimism”. Madame C, a former Nazi party member, is the leader of Optimal Optimism. When the cult members discovers that Frankie is gay, he is repeatedly raped by both men and women of the group. Hannes must find a way to rescue him.
Via the UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive: "Shocking, often hilarious, and always controversial, Rosa von Praunheim delivers a radical treatise on heterosexuality in Red Love by intertwining statements of an outspoken, middle aged advocate of free love, with a melodramatic reenactment of a feminist novel by Alexandra Kollontai, Lenin's first Minister of Culture. Frau Helga Goetze, who at the age of 46 left her seven children and husband of 30 years, describes in detail the progress of her sexual liberation. Now 55 years old, she conservatively estimates the number of her lovers over the last few years at 200."
With stars like Angie Stardust (also music credits), Judith Flex, and Joaquin La Habana, director Rosa von Praunheim has fashioned a film about the teeming flip side of life in Berlin centered on eccentric characters of almost every imaginable sexual orientation, or disorientation -- most are American performers drawn to the city of "lost souls" as a place where they can give full rein to their creative natures.
Tally Brown, New York is a 1979 documentary film directed, written and produced by Rosa von Praunheim. The film is about the singing and acting career of Tally Brown, a classically trained opera and blues singer who was a star of underground films in New York City and a denizen of its underworld in the late 1960s. In this documentary, Praunheim relies on extensive interviews with Brown, as she recounts her collaboration with Andy Warhol, Taylor Mead and others, as well as her friendships with Holly Woodlawn, and Divine. Brown opens the film with a cover of David Bowie's "Heroes" and concludes with "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide." The film captures not only Tally Brown’s career but also a particular New York milieu in the 1970s. (Wikipedia)
A documentary about "Death" magazine, founded by "Screw" Magazine founder and publisher Al Goldstein, and its eventual failure.
Personal diary-style documentary of German Gay rights activist Von Praunheim's sojourn in the US.
In this film, outspokenly homosexual filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim has documented his encounters with friends in the New York "underground" arts movement, the better-known of whom are William Burroughs (who says nothing for the camera), Andy Warhol (seen in the distance) and Fernando Arrabal (who is interviewed in Spanish). The emigrants named in the title are notable Germans who left the country before World War II, such as Greta Keller and Grete Mosheim. Reviewers at the time of the film's release considered it to have been a sort of paid vacation for the filmmaker rather than a serious effort. (Clarke Fountain, Rovi)
In collage sequences, the surrogate of synthetic sensuality takes form and seduces the sailors in the guise of a Hawaiian girl. In ritual punctuation, she distributes deaths which seemingly only the hardy siren Fatality can survive.
In this sequel to Die Bettwurst, Dietmar and Luzi are a somewhat unorthodox couple, who live and fight with tremendous enthusiasm. The unusual nature of their liaison is signalled by the fact that Dietmar is bisexual and is completely unable to remain faithful to Luzi. Dietmar also has his own, personal dialect of German. Luzi, on the other hand, is coziness personified. No matter, in this film they get married at the Memorial Church in Berlin. Infuriated at his playing around, Luzi briefly splits up with him, but when her dog dies of poisoning, he is there to comfort her.
Daniel, a young man from the provinces come to the city and moves from one gay subculture to the next. His adventures begin on the streets of Berlin, where the shy brunette Daniel meets the blonde Clemens, who invites him home for coffee and offers him a place to stay. Soon Daniel is living with Clemens and believes he has found the love of his life. The two try to imitate a bourgeois marriage and its lifestyle. But after four months of tedium, Daniel is cruised by a rich older man who entices him to move into his villa, where he encounters a group of older gays, pretentious in their appreciations of fine art and classical music, who fawn over him.
It’s love at first sight: elderly secretary Luzi and young, unemployed Dietmar find each other by accident in Rosa von Praunheim’s outrageous genre, social satire.
Short film about queer left-wing people in West Berlin.
(A)lter (A)ction, 1968. Videotape, black-and-white, sound; 65 minutes (director's edit: 57 minute television version).
You say you’re interested in film and you’ve never been to the Moviemento? You are hereby put on cineastic probation – at least until you watch Bernd Sobolla’s documentary.
