Millenium Docs Against Gravity 
Film Festival, Warschau:
 Queer Experiences 
of a Body

The film section of the 22^nd Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival is an invitation to take a look at queer expression in the context of the concepts of embodiment and sensuous theories, as well as theories of performativity. It focuses on works created in the 1990s, when both queer theory was taking shape and film phenomenology studies focused on the lived-body were developing. It pays special attention to the queer feminist perspective, focusing largely on the works and experiences of women understood in an inclusive sense, encompassing all those who have/had experience of being women. The context for recalling these films from the history of cinema is the phenomenon of New Queer Cinema, related to the appearance of films dedicated to queer topics at the most important international film festivals in the early 1990s. As B. Ruby Rich pointed out in the text New Queer Cinema published in Sight and Sound in 1992, the reason of discontent was the fact “all the new movies being snatched up by distributors, shown in mainstream festivals, booked into theatres, were by the boys,” while lesbian cinema was unnoticed. The film section reverses this historical proportion of interest in women’s cinema within queer cinema. It highlights experimental film works that explore the experiences of a body—different in terms of age, class, race, and health—recalling the work of Sadie Benning (IT WASN’T LOVE, USA 1992), Shani Mootoo (HER SWEETNESS LINGERS, USA 1994), Tran T. Kim-Trang (KORE, USA 1994), Pratibha Parmar (A PLACE OF RAGE, USA 1991; KHUSH, UK 1991), Ursula Pürrer, Dietmar Schipek, Ashley Hans Scheirl (FLAMING EARS, Austria 1991), Angelika Levi (SEX PARTY, Germany 1987; FRIENDS, Germany 1994) for queer feminist thought, and presenting them alongside works by Derek Jarman (BLUE, BG, Japan 1993), Matthias Müller (PENSÃO GLOBO, Germany 1997), and Ming Yuen S. Ma (SNIFF, USA 1997). The retrospective will be accompanied by a presentation of the latest film by Jean Carlomusto, whose first works delighted critics in the 1990s in the context of the New Queer Cinema wave, ESTHER NEWTON MADE ME GAY (USA, 2022). (Gabriela Sitek)