»ifs Encounters« Gender & Diversity
On the big screen:
»Rule 34« (BR/FR, 2022, feature film, 100 min., FSK 18, original version with english & german subtitles, director: Júlia Murat)
Followed by a film discussion with filmmaker, actor and writer Alex Mello
Moderation: Maxa Zoller, Artistic Director IFFF Dortmund+Köln
The film will be shown in the original language with English and German subtitles.
The film discussion will be in German, with the possibility of an English translation.
During the day, 23-year-old Black law student Simone energetically discusses the situation of women in Brazilian society in the lecture hall. She works in a centre for victims of domestic violence and researches the causes of racism and femicide. At night, she performs in front of her webcam in a sex chat room and is spurred on to ever more extreme practices. Her private life contrasts with her intellectual ambitions: a free-spirited mixture of self-defence courses and sexual experiments in a protected space with her university friends/lover and video calls with a trusted BDSM practitioner who accompanies her on this precarious path. As she seeks more radical forms of sexual gratification, the lines between body empowerment and self-harm, social responsibility and personal pleasure become blurred.
»Rule 34« won the Golden Leopard for Best Film at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival - this was only the second time since Glauber Rocha's »Land in Trance« (1967) that a Brazilian film received the award. The title is named after the internet meme of the same name about pornography. Murat sees pornography primarily as a risk - and in this film she risks quite a bit: here, the conventions of feature film in terms of content and form come to their limits, opening up new forms of political storytelling. Is this a new, global narrative form of feature film in times of crisis?
Mello is an Afro-Latin American filmmaker, actor and writer. His artistic research focuses on intersectional perspectives on race, belonging and gender in the context of migration societies. In the audiovisual field, he focuses on independent productions that address marginalised bodies. Mello became a member of the Association of Black Audiovisual Professionals - APAN in Brazil in 2022 and is part of the Black Filmmaking Community in Germany. In 2021, he won a scholarship for the Black Reels project, which is aimed at black filmmakers in Germany.
Content Note:
FSK 18 | The film contains scenes of a sexual nature and violence that some viewers may find disturbing.
