Tribute to Rosa von Praunheim
Rosa von Praunheim has been making queer films for four decades. He was born in 1942 as Holger Mischwitzky in Riga, Latvia. He chose his artist name Rosa to remind people of the pink triangle ("rosa Winkel") that homosexuals were forced to wear in the Nazi concentration camps. He has made more than 60 films, many of which deal with his favorite subjects: homosexuality, older women, New York City.
The Mezipatra retrospective will showcase a film from each of his creative decades.
In 1971 he achieved notoriety throughout Germany with his film It’s not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Situation in Which He Lives. The appearance of this film was crucial to the founding of the new German gay movement. Over 50 political gay groups sprang up in the wake of his film’s showing in the cities and towns of Germany. With the black comedy A Virus Knows No Morals (1985), he produced one of the first feature films about AIDS. I Am My Own Woman (1992) earned the International Film Critics Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Men, Heroes and Gay Nazis (2005) is thematically linked to his famous portraits of witnesses of the Nazi era.
The film profile is complemented by an exhibition of selected posters to Rosa’s films.
The director will be present at the festival.
“Homosexuality is, contrary to the common argument, not a private matter. No! Being gay or lesbian will be no private matter as long as for being so we will continue to be beaten, lose jobs, thrown out of flats; as long as teens will continue growing up with suicidal thoughts and remain neurotic. Sexuality is no private matter as long as all the newspapers of the world, all novels of world literature and all modern media continue to dig in the private lives of heterosexuals while leaving out that of homosexuals. This double ethics can stop only when each of us faces their sexuality, perversion without being judged by the state, church or other moral apostles.”
Rosa von Praunheim
50 Jahre pervers. Die sentimentalen Memoiren des Rosa von Praunheim