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XPOSED International Queer Film Festival
Thursday, 29 May 2025 until Sunday, 01 June 2025
Fifteen years of shaping, forming, breaking, discovering and finding XPOSED is about QUEER FILM in all it’s forms, glory, shame, distaste, trash and beauty. Sometimes it’s all in one and sometimes it’s spread out like Blanche at the Rusty Anchor.
XPOSED was started as a passion project, a passion for Queer Film, for Berlin and the ever expanding possibilities of storytelling within the world of Queer Film and the festival remains to this day a passion project. This festival is made by people who enjoy making festival, who enjoy queer films, filmmakers and queer Berlin, and this is reflected within the programming of the festival.
By not only screening some of the newest films around, XPOSED takes special care to always mix their programs with new and old films, be it in a short film program or a feature screening with a short. XPOSED enjoys creating programs and these programs can only be created by looking at the queer perspective from all corners of the world, perspectives that challenge normative views, propose an alternate way of thinking, and approach life and story telling from another way.
Created in 2006, the XPOSED International Queer Film Festival has built itself with the aim of creating entertaining, odd, left of centre Queer Film Programs that also in turn eXPOSE the Queer Filmmakers out into the international world of Queer Festivals and beyond. You can only be you when you are truly XPOSED. This festival, in the end, is about YOU.
2025 films...
Opening Shorts – Extending Reality
In Sierra Leone, best friends Aya and Boi decide to marry each other in an attempt to escape escape society's pressures to conform.
Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda
Sierra Leone, 2025
Krio. Subtitles in English
16 min
Queer bodies attract, fall in love, falter, perish. Are our bodies more vulnerable, and therefore our loves, too? A poetic video letter; an intimate experiment of image and sound, of heart, head and hormones; and a loving ode to those who have passed on before memories together could be made.
Content Notes:
mention of death, grief
Jordi Wijnalda
Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, United States, 2024
Catalan, English, Dutch. Subtitles in English, German
14 min
JuJu vs The Possibilities of Love, Life & Death
The film centers around our protagonist JuJu, a Burmese trans femme working at an independent cinema in Bangkok. There, she meets another Burmese guy, who may or may not be romantically interested in her. What follows is a series of conversations, and imaginations/scenarios in JuJu's mind exploring the power of queer representation in mainstream media, queer identity, stereotypes, and finding love.
Content Notes:
stylized violence
Htet Aung Lwyn
Thailand, 2024
Burmese. Subtitles in English
15 min
Martín, a flamboyant urban raver, is involved in a strange accident on the road on his way to a party in the middle of the Argentine Pampas. Finding refuge in a mysterious country grocery store and sheltered by two strange locals, Martín's paranoia begins to take over him. As the hours progress, his perception begins to distort, unleashing disturbing visions that will lead him to confront the supernatural forces that hide in the night.
Content Notes:
flashing Lights
Gervasio CANDA, Patricio PLAZA and Paula BOFFO
Argentina – Canada, 2025
French, English. Subtitles in English, Spanish
11 min
Giu is not sure about what he is living with Danilo, but he decides to tell his version of the story.
Pethrus Tiburcio
Brasil, 2025
Brazilian Portuguese. Subtitles in English
25 min
Some Nights I Feel Like Walking
Tripoli / A Tale of Three Cities
A Talaandig-Manobo indigenous trans woman grapples with discrimination to uphold her community’s culture to become a babaylan (Filipino queer shaman) amid the destruction of her ancestral land in Bukidnon, Philippines. This queer ecological story followers her life as she finds meaning in her ancestry and embraces her true destiny as the spiritual descendant of Baradiya.
Gab Mejia, Miko Reyes, Datu Arayan, and David Loughran
Philippines, 2024
Binukid and Bisaya. Subtitles in English
30 min
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing
When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender essay film questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and land.
Theo Panagopoulos
UK (Scotland), 2024
No dialogue. Subtitles in English
17 min
Filament Fortune offers poetic portraits of HIV+ folks ranging across the Americas, from Canada via Philippines, Brazil and Mexico. In place of documentary realism are video fragments, swimming idylls, and fantastical bouquets arranged over landscapes. Accompanying these sun-drenched frames are intimate and searing asides from La Jerry, Lírio Nascimento and the filmmaker himself. (Mike Hoolboom)
Beau Gomez
Canada, 2024
Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, English. Subtitles in English
10 min
Speaking Flowers is a Super 8 film ironically overloaded with flowers and fairy tale film motifs. A film that begins like a supposed color therapy when opulent carpets of flowers blend into one another and yet gradually begin to crack when the harmonious floral world turns into artificial flowers and other decorative kitsch made of plastic rabbits and empathetic plastic deer, which impute an innerdialogical ambivalence to us with calendar-like phrases and establish ever more obtrusively how exhausted we feel after all. Meanwhile, the film grows into an absurd fairy-tale movie theatricality in which the only apparently humanoid being itself is a flower that leads us more and more through the diffuse events and yet abandons us in a void of floral profusion - a floral superabundance in which it is never quite clear whether we are already in a swan song to the beauty of nature when the flowers ask themselves, "Am I the only one still alive?"
Charlotte Maria Kätzl und Conrad Veit
Germany, 2023
English. Subtitles in English
18 min
Sam — a deviant artist and proud flower person — is spending one last day in a flower spa with his mother before his final performance act. Sam is fully turning into a flower, a decision hard to accept by his mother. On that last day, between over-the-top treatment and supposed relaxation, the two tries to converse, navigating between grief and love.
Ariel Victor Arthanto
Germany, 2024
English. Subtitles in English
13 min
Shorts 3 – Another Life, Another Screen
The video camera was Nelson Sullivan's closest friend. He shared every moment of his life with it for twenty years - from insignificant grocery shopping to deaths of his friends that affected him deeply. He was part of the New York underground scene where he witnessed the birth of stars including the legendary RuPaul.
Julie Petríková
Czech republic, 2023
English. Subtitles in English
30 min
The reunion of two ski jumping champions whose romantic past will resurface as they face the demands of their sponsors.
Camille Tricaud and Franziska Unger
Germany, 2023
French englisch german. Subtitles in English
20 min
A sequence of family anecdotes and historical events coinciding with the artist's date of birth takes on a different tone as he unearths what happened in his native Peru on that specific day in 1989. The monotonous pattern of facts pertaining to the 31st of May suddenly begins to unveil connections to notions of oppressive masculinity, the nuanced tactics employed by imperialist forces, and a neoliberal dream that facilitated the neglect of an important episode in Peruvian history.
Content Notes:
flashing lights, mention of mass murder
Daniel Jacoby
Peru/Netherlands, 2023
Spanish. Subtitles in English
14 min
Two childhood best friends reconnect after years of separation. Chay, a Phnom Penh resident, helps Lyer, who comes from the countryside, get a job as a projectionist in the city. A film screening prompts them to wonder about their future together.
Seakleng Song
Cambodia, 2024
Khmer. Subtitles in English
17 min
Two friends share the same body in virtual reality as they travel back to their home country to relive good and bad memories and reopen wounds.
Content Notes:
mention of transphobia
Eric Bitencourt
Germany, 2025
Brazilian Portuguese. Subtitles in English, German
11 min
I’ve practiced these words for 20 years now, but maybe being candid isn’t the best idea. At this moment, I decide to stop, starting the countdown again, another cycle of 20 years. Maybe it might be the right time by then.
WeiFan Wang
Taiwan, UK, 2024
Mandarin. Subtitles in English
6 min
C-TV (If I Tell You I Like You…)
The earth has been shaken, the television studio destroyed, C-TV goes on air: Hedi, the plush talk show host welcomes people with disabilities who offer insight into their daily lives and their artistic and political work. An (unfortunately) fictitious TV show opposing the tyranny of a heteronormative and ableist society: radical, critical of representation, humorous, and barrier-free. more: https://www.sixpackfilm.com/en/catalogue/2859/
Eva Egermann, Cordula Thym
Austria, 2023
german. Subtitles in English, German
30 min
Distortions and deconstructions of Y2K pop stars’ seductive images and iconic hits.
Ela Kazdal
United Kingdom, Turkey, 2024
No Dialogue. Subtitles in –
2 min
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for Mabel Dove
When The Great Erasure interrupts her reading of Dove’s story, The Black Girl goes in search of the author. After the Feminist Bookseller and Africanist Professor do not help her, she turns to The Revisionists, in whose cyberarchive she is able to locate Dove and the two spend an afternoon together. Told in the style of a ciné-roman, the film is an homage to George Bernard Shaw and Dove’s “Adventure” novellas.
Nnenna Onuoha
Ghana and Germany, 2024
English. Subtitles in English, German
15 min
Do Digital Curanderas Use Eggs In Their Limpias?
A struggling Latinx healer considers abandoning the physical world for promises of a digital utopia.
Roberto Fatal
united states, 2023
english, spanish. Subtitles in English
14 min
Pigeons are dying, when the city is on fire
On the warmest day of the year, two boys meet. A few hours later a pigeon gets trapped with them. During this heatwave, all creatures dream of escaping from the city that's burning.
Stavros Markoulakis
Greece, the Netherlands, 2023
Greek. Subtitles in English
21 min
Shorts 5 – Prayers For The Future
This work is an ongoing trans-oceanic artistic research project that deals with the transmutation of violence within the cock fighting phenomenon across different territories and cosmovisions. I’ve been deeply immersed in the process of creating rituals that would address the need of tending to our deaths. I tackle this through an anti-colonial lens and by creating collective ceremonies for gender and sexually diverse people. In the particular case of the “Prayer for tending death” I started visiting cockfights in Nicaragua after the 2018 uprising that left me with a lot of death taking root in my inner universe. I would take the dying roosters back to my house to honor their death as a way to face the fear for the souls of the people I lost, transitioning to the ancestral realm. So I would give their blood to the earth, plug their feathers, cleanse them with sacred tobacco and share a meal with my queer sisters. This became a way of transmuting the pain of the roosters and our own deaths in the community.
Content Notes:
Explosion, Death
Raghed Charabaty
Lebanon, Canada, 2025
Arabic, English. Subtitles in English
16 min
Doroty's dream was to perform on stage, dance in a skirt and be recognized as the woman she was, but death came before she fulfilled it. Her best friend Misael, a 60 year old gay man, will make it happen. Together with LGBTIQ+ youth, Misael forms the first diverse folk dance group in his city, questioning their traditions that are defended by cultural values in order to erase their queerness
Sara J. Asprilla Palomino
Colombia, 2023
Spanish. Subtitles in English
19 min
Whoever deserves it, will be immortal
Sergio, Ubaldo, Yolexquys and Winston belong to different generations and share a collective historical memory: being part of the Cuban gay community. Between experiences of discrimination and celebration, they recall memories of the early years of the Revolution where the LGBT+ community was sent to concentration camps. Now and together, they evoke the power of being who they are.
Content Notes:
homophobic language
Nay Mendl
Cuba, 2024
spanish. Subtitles in English
19 min
Nicaraguan artist Elyla, infiltrates the patriarchal-heteronormative cockfighting scene to research how to transmute collective pain through communitary healing rituals.
Content Notes:
religious animal sacrifice
Elyla
Nicaragua, 2024
Español, Chontal-Matagalpa. Subtitles in English
12 min
HOLD ME CLOSE explores the unique power and complexity of the relationship between two Queer Black womxn, Corinne and Tiana. Utilizing audio the couple self-recorded every day over the course of a season, Corinne & Tiana experience cycles of life’s joys and pains together in the home they share. Depicted through elegantly composed tableaus of domestic scenes of the couple shot on super 16mm film, paired with searingly intimate documentary audio of the womxn from life within their home, the film bears witness to the distinct constitution of their love.
Aurora Brachman, LaTajh Simmons-Weaver
USA, 2025
English. Subtitles in –
19 min
Shorts 6 – Strategy For Survival
Gustavo, a young man passionate about the sea and photography who shares experiences through his memories the strange meaning of being black.
Content Notes:
racism
Wallace Douglas
Brasil, 2024
portuguese. Subtitles in English
11 min
Embodying the dreams and ideologies of Yerevan's post-Soviet generation, Sona and Amassia meet in high school and form an experimental electronica band called Symptom Error. They soon become known for their underground shows, which are often disrupted by sexist and homophobic police intervention. The stakes get higher on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, when thousands take to the streets demanding social and political change. Sona and Amassia are the first amongst their friends to join the crowds. As the people of Armenia feel the waves of the revolution for years to come, we follow Symptom in their rise to fame. They continue to make music through the pandemic and war, and their dreams finally begin to take shape as they prepare for their first international tour.
Kamee Abrahamian
Armenia, Canada, 2024
Armenian, English. Subtitles in English
23 min
“Dirty Care” is an essay film shot from first-person perspective. From martial arts training to everyday life, we follow the protagonist's point of view and a voiceover through various landscapes and tasks. In a public toilet, above the rooftops of Vienna at sunrise, in a trailer park and in a snowy landscape, we are instructed and trained to defend ourselves against a physical attack. “Dirty Care” describes the efforts that non-normative women have to make in order not to be exposed to patriarchal violence or to be capable of standing up to it. The film portrays scenes of empowerment, intimacy, resilience and companionship.
Isa Schieche
Austria, 2025
German. Subtitles in English
16 min
One night of 2022, Mindia and Joy meet in a park in Tbilisi and quickly connect. Though LGBTQ+ people still face discrimination in Georgia, as the government tightens laws around “family values”, Pride events and queer expression are increasingly suppressed. Seeking a different future, they launch a small vintage clothing business to save funds and leave for Belgium as asylum seekers. In the refugee shelter they face privacy issues and grapple with the instability of their legal status. The two find support within the local queer community, but when their asylum application is unexpectedly denied, they must once again try to stay together.
Content Notes:
xenophobia, homophobia
Valeriu Adimei
Belgium, Romania, 2024
Georgian. Subtitles in English
17 min
In one night, three queer people remember the pains and delights of being who they are.
Content Notes:
ableism
Victor Di Marco e Márcio Picoli
Brazil, 2022
Portuguese. Subtitles in English
19 min
Ponay (or You Are Not F***ing Welcome)
Cherry is one bureaucratic checkmark away from obtaining a gender identity exemption for the military draft: they ‘just’ have to travel from Bangkok to their family home in Thailand’s deep south to get a residency document. On this final stretch, not only do they have to deal with their conservative family’s outright rejection and abuse, but even those who do recognise their queerness harbour misplaced expectations towards how Cherry performs their gender.
Content Notes:
homophobia, transphobia, domestic violence
Hesome Chamamah
Thailand, 2024
Thai. Subtitles in English
26 min
"hi ading" is a poetic short that provides a glimpse into a love story. Speaking to their parents past selves, Dinaly asks and hopes that these past versions might help present them realize that the decisions they may not understand, are still made out of love.
Dinaly Tran
Canada, 2023
English, Vietnamese, Ilocano. Subtitles in English
2 min
Weaving personal family archives, reenacted rituals and stories of Priya's girlhood which Raag grew up listening to, Warm Shadows is about a secret between a mother and a son that must be kept hidden, despite the yearning to break free.
Aakash Chhabra
India, Singapore, 2025
Punjabi, Hindi. Subtitles in English
15 min
My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness
During the three-year process of undergoing therapy, a filmmaker ponders the question of being fully accepted and loved by combing through archival material from their two families: their biological, devout Christian, Indonesian family, and their chosen queer kin in Berlin.
Content Notes:
family conflict
Monica Vanesa Tedja
Indonesia, 2024
Indonesian, English. Subtitles in English
22 min
‘I pronounce you wife and wife.’ A young couple design their perfect wedding online, but then mom dials in.
Content Notes:
homophobia, family conflict
Oktania Hamdani & Winner Wijaya
Indonesia, 2024
Indonesian. Subtitles in English
8 min
Wouldn’t Make It Any Other Way
Having built a colorful queer life in an American prairie town, an aspiring costume designer visits their island homeland of Guam to make costumes for a children’s theatre while reconnecting with distant parents.
Hao Zhou
U.S., 2024
English. Subtitles in English
21 min
A pre-adolescent kid spends a family summer holiday at a golf village. A newly built lake on a golf course becomes the backdrop to a mysterious encounter. And the discovery of an unknown other becomes the discovery of the unknown self.
Alexander David
Portugal, France, 2024
Portuguese. Subtitles in English
23 min
Doubt creeps in as Cosmo, a space traveller, addresses his gender identity. In need of clarity and change, he wants to risk crossing the Butterfly Nebula. His spaceship, on the other hand, has a personality of her own. Cosmo will need to negotiate change with a certain loss of control.
Caio Amado Soares
Germany / Portugal, 2025
English. Subtitles in English, German
12 min
During the summer, 16-year-old Najib spends his days gaming until his mother, Asma, informs him of their old neighbor's passing. Intrigued, Najib takes the keys to the neighbor's apartment, uncovering an unexpected world within.
Valentin Noujaïm
France, 2024
French. Subtitles in English
24 min
Two boarding school roommates share a strange experience with sleepwalking.
Connor Jessup
Canada, 2024
English. Subtitles in –
15 min
Fabián, a preteen who lives in the marginalized outskirts of Bogotá, is forced to walk the streets with the group of friends of his older brother led by the most developed of the guys, nicknamed "La Comadreja". It rains and the boys bury a dead dog, Meanwhile, Fabián finds himself alone with an unknown impulse; the first bud of his desire provoked by another man; the leader of the group.
Andrés Felipe Ángel
Colombia, 2023
Spanish. Subtitles in English
19 min
Mơ roams through the rush hour traffic to avoid an unwanted phone call. When she meets Vicky by the side of the street with her broken motorbike, a visceral chance encounter unfolds between the two young queer women on the loud streets of Saigon.
Hồng Anh Nguyễn
Vietnam, Germany, Australia, 2024
Vietnamese. Subtitles in English, German
22 min
A Chinese poem may also sound like an English letter. Secrets are briefly revealed, but at the same time the door to them is closed forever. We linger at the door, and I just want to stay with you longer.
Mengzhu Xue
Germany, China, 2024
Mandarin, English. Subtitles in English
30 min