Sex/Commune- A Short Season of Films on Sex and Radical Politics

LimaZulu presents a season of films depicting the relationship between radical politics and sexual expression.

Monday 12th- 7PM Daddy and the Muscle Academy (Dir. Ilppo Pohjola, 1991)

Touko Laaksonen was a young Finnish advertising student when he began drawing pornographic scenes of hyper-masculine men for his own pleasure. By the time of his death in 1991 Tom of Finland was a legend within gay culture. However his images always walked an uneasy line, featuring a fetishisation of fascistic imagery and hyper-sexualised black males. Daddy and the Muscle Academy traces Tom’s personal and artistic development.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104045/)

Monday 12th- 9PM Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator
(Dir. Dusan Makavejev, 1967)

Originally refused release in Britain, Switchboard Operator tells the story of a young worker and her love affair with a rat-catcher and former partisan. Its idiosyncratic Yugoslavian director mixes his melodramatic tale with a disjointed look at the uneasy position of Yugoslavian socialism, ideologically trapped between Western Europe, with its hedonistic consumerism, and the official culture of the Soviet Union.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061912/)

Thursday 15th- 7PM Beast of Stray (Dir. Jessie Thurston, 2010)

Beast of Stray, showing for the first time in the UK, is a new film by the young Californian director Jessie Thurston. Following Zumi, a young girl, into the desert with a group of LA hipsters, the film focuses on her discovery of a commune and its slide into a fucked-up hedonism of sex, music and drugs.
(http://www.jessiethurston.com/)

Thursday 15th- 9PM Raspberry Reich (Dir. Bruce LaBruce, 2004)

A pornographic satire on “revolutionary chic”, The Raspberry Reich features hardcore radical terrorist Gudrun (in the mode of RAF urban-guerrilla Gudrun Ensslin) in her quest to destroy bourgeois morality through a “Homosexual Intifada”. A highly explicit and tongue-in-cheek look at the fetishisation of leftist doctrinal dogmatism, the film twists the question of revolutionary commitment originally posed by the Weathermen- "Are you revolutionary enough to give up your girlfriends?"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raspberry_Reich)

Sunday 18th- 2PM Born in 68 (Dirs. Olivier Ducastel/Jacques Martineau, 2008)

This epic drama, coming in at almost 170 minutes, traces three generations of French leftist radicals from their involvement in the student-worker uprisings of May 68, right up to the election of Sarkozy in 2007. Its intense, emotional narrative of the personal relationships of a group of friends is intertwined with their political development, through their departure from the workers struggle to set up a utopian commune in the French countryside, the taking up of vanguardist revolutionary violence, and their children’s subsequent involvement in the gay rights movement and AIDS activism, all focused upon the farmhouse that was their home for 40 years.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160015/)

Tuesday 20th- 7PM Maggots and Men (Dir. Cary Cronenwett, 2009)
                                   
Maggots and Men, an experimental historical narrative set in post-revolutionary Russia, re-tells the story of the 1921 uprising of the Kronstadt sailors with a subtext of gender anarchy. A thoughtful homage to Soviet silent era directors and artists of the Russian avant-garde, the film explores themes of re-invention, revolution, community, and corruption. The film is set in the all male environment of a Russian naval base, but cast with actors from a range of masculine gender expressions, resulting in a film that redefines male, challenges the binary gender construct, and intentionally creates confusion.
(http://www.maggotsandmen.com)

Tuesday 20th- 9PM Maedchen in Uniform (Dir. Leontine Sagan/Carl Froelich, 1931)

Originally released in 1931 in the atmosphere of the liberalising Weimar Republic, this groundbreaking film about a spirited teenage girl, Manuela, announcing her love for her young teacher, Fraulein Von Bernberg. The film was revolutionary not just for its sympathetic, libertarian approach to both sexuality and the authoritarian Prussian school system, but also for its unique co-operative and profit-sharing production.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022183/)

Thursday 22nd- 7PM Heart of the World (Dir. Guy Maddin, 2000)

An amazing 6-minute short film packed with references and to early silent-film making and the Russian avant-garde, in which a beautiful young scientist must seduce one of two brothers in order to save the earth.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0260948/)

Thursday 22nd- 7.30PM The Fall of Communism as seen in Gay Pornography (Dir. William E. Jones, 1998)

A compelling and moving short film, compiled from audition tapes for gay porn films made in Eastern Europe and Russia, examining the effect of the influx of the western sex economy on the men and boys desperate for work. 
(http://www.williamejones.com/collections/view/6/)

Thursday 22nd- 8PM Paris is Burning (Dir. Jennie Livingston, 1990)

Completing our triple-bill, Paris is Burning documents the Drag Ball culture of New York; highlighting Americas complicated relationship with class, gender and race. It follows young gay, queer and trans Americans building themselves their own culture at odds with their (often conservative) upbringings, whilst continuing to struggle against poverty, institutionalized homophobia and AIDS crisis.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100332/)

Sunday 25th- 2PM Proh-soh'pa-peer (Dir. Richard John Jones, 2009)

Jones’ fascinating art film features documentary interviews of participants of a variety of British political movements and protests, from the gay rights movement to the G20 protests, interspersed with footage from a performance of radical drag queens filmed in South-East London, creating a compelling snapshot of the language of performative street protest since the kick-lines of the Stonewall Girls. “When did you ever see a fag fight back? This shit has got to stop”
(http://richardjohnjones.blogspot.com/)

Sunday 25th- 3PM Born in Flames (Dir. Lizzie Borden, 1983)

Set ten years after the most peaceful revolution in United States history, a revolution in which a socialist government gains power, this films presents a dystopia in which the issues of many progressive groups - minorities, liberals, gay rights organizations, feminists - are ostensibly dealt with by the government, and yet there are still problems with jobs, with gender issues, with governmental preference and violence. In New York City, in this future time, a group of women decide to organize and mobilize, to take the revolution farther than any man - and many women - ever imagined in their lifetimes.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_in_Flames)

LimaZulu is an artist-run project space in Manor House, North London.
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