XPOSED Short Films: Secrets and Resistance

Six short films from the 17th XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin offer advice on dating, explore histories of pleasure and community, and celebrate the day-to-day acts of resistance. Whether through small secrets or humorous artwork, these filmmakers and their protagonists challenge their circumstances.

How Not To Date While Trans

Nzala Moon, USA, 2022, 14 min

“How Not To Date While Trans ” is a break-the-fourth-wall, dark comedy that follows the dating life of a black trans woman and the problematic men she meets along the way. Andie searches for romance and self-love but ends with heartbreak.

Al-Atlal (The Ruins)

Raed Rafei, Lebanon/USA, 2021, 16 min

In a French travel book to the Middle East, a drawing of an ancient bathhouse sparks a visual poem inspired by the Arab literary tradition of “standing by the ruins.” The ambivalence of the five-hundred-year-old image gestures towards enduring imperial power dynamics. Pleasure and pain, seduction and domination, homoeroticism and violence, archives and ruins, histories of sex and of empire, all commingle in this essay film.

Memórias Reveladas (Memories Revealed)

Quentin Worthington, France, 2019, 23 min

From Buenos Aires to Hanover, this photo-novel reveals the struggles, lives spent in exile and grief, but also the happy memories of trans women like Magali, Maria Belen, Ivana, and Carla, who work to protect a treasure trove of seven thousand photos: the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina.

Les Corps Dansants (Dancing Bodies)

Laure Giappiconi, La Fille Renne & Elisa Monteil, France, 2019, 5 min

Dancing Bodies is a joyful and sexual ode to sorority.

Os Animais Mais Fofos e Engraçados do Mundo (The Cutest and Funniest Animals in the World)

Renato Sircilli, Brazil, 2023, 24 min

Jorge is 70 years old and is one of the most capricious and dedicated janitors at the Paradise Motel, except for a single detail: He secretly records the audios of the room’s guests. Selling these audios to Alberto earns him an extra income as well as affection, even though Jorge no longer remembers what his own pleasure sounds like.

Very Important Trans Artwork

Maz Murray, United Kingom, 2021, 8 min

A transmasculine person returns to their hometown in Essex just before the coronavirus pandemic. They try to conjure a treatise on trans-masculinity, Essex girls/boys, class and performances of gender but they’re just too tired from long covid…