April 6th, 2018

Lasse Långström discusses collective queer practices and politics of film with Atlanta Ina Beyer. Film can be a powerful tool in creating visions, for example for negotiating or creating new understandings of community, queer collectivity and politics. The discussion will focus on the politics of narratives and aesthetic, but also on collective production processes and the specific potentials of musicals. How can we create and sustain queer communities and can film and its narratives help us manifest our political and sexual desires?

Lasse Långström is a film director based in Gothenburg, Sweden, often collaborating with his queer community and friends. His work merges the personal with the political, the anarchic with humor, the musical with the sexual. He just toured his most recent movie Who will Fuck Daddy? (2017) around Europe and in the US. The film won the ZINEGOAK prize for Best Experimental Movie at the Bilbao Film Festival. He has directed a number of short movies, e.g. Robert Frank (2013), Shave me, mirror me (2015) and Cry Alliance of Our Hatred (2010). His work has been screened in festivals like MIX New York, Korea Queer Film Festival, TILDE Australia, Berlin Porn Film Festival and Transcreen Amsterdam. In December 2017, the Anthology Film Archive in New York showed a mini retrospective of his work.

Atlanta Ina Beyer is an anthropologist, journalist, and author. In her dissertation project, she is researching (intermedia) aesthetic strategies conceived in zines and musical productions that were created in the context of queer punk movements. She is interested in the utopian-projective powers of the queer aesthetic in (re-)negotiations of the political – the communal and the contested – within and beyond queer movements. She is co-editor of Perverse Assemblages. Queering Heteronormative Orders Inter/medially (Revolver Verlag, Berlin, forthcoming – together with Barbara Paul, Josch Hoenes, Natascha Frankenberg and Rena Onat).

SYNOPSIS FOLKBILDNINGSTERROR
Swedish filmmakers Göteborgs Förenade Musikalaktivister created Folkbildningterror, a musical committed to radical-queer militancy. The film presents a challenge to ticket inspections and gay marriage, employment agencies and the captivity of animals, to the pathologizing and discrimination of transpeople and to state violence. The neo-liberal Swedish state makes Theo’s mother sick. Beaten down by the ghost of over-economization, Theo meets transwomen Kleopatra and a rabbit for violence. An ever-growing group joins the three protagonists who end up in a plenary debate about whether they should consider EU-funding for their resistance. They define themselves as queer feminist, anti-capitalist and left-wing autonomous. They make self-mocking comments about their political scene, take hormones without prescriptions, ban toxic masculinities from their anarchist spaces, believe in black magic, live out their sexual fantasies and are accountable to one another. And then: “Glitter and Guns!”. Drawing on self-taught songs and choreography and with the help of a Danish terror cell, they go into armed battle singing and dancing. Their songs are instruments of resistance – they deal out criticism and map out redeeming utopias.