Film Streaming
GERMAN CINEMA NOW! Jochen Hick’s “My Wonderful West-Berlin” (2017) [online]
Celebration of the gay movements of West-Berlin in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s -- a place that was both hedonistic and revolutionary.
The monthly Goethe Pop Up Film Series supports artistic works that amplify the plurality of voices and experiences to inspire public dialogue.
The film screenings take place in partnership with Northwest Film Forum Seattle.
This month’s screening will take place online. Please register in advance and pay what you can. All June ticket proceeds to Northwest Film Forum will benefit the cause against injustice and will go directly to BLM Seattle-King County, Trans Women of Color Solidarity Network, Rainier Valley Community Clinic, and others.
About the film:
Berlin today is considered the queer capital of Europe and a vanishing point for non-heterosexual people from all over the world: open, diverse, and quite party-friendly. The origins of this feeling of freedom are to be found, of all places, in the former city of the Berlin Wall, West Berlin. Almost everything that we know today as queer Berlin institutions - from the Gay Museum to the Victory Column, the SchwuZ and the Teddy Award to the AIDS-Hilfe – had been launched in West Berlin.
During the cold war, the city’s unique, isolated position included such perks as no conscription for its residents, drawing in West German pacifists and non-conformists in droves, among them many young gay men. Despite this, gay men faced repression under the notorious Section 175, a provision of the German Criminal Code that was a remnant of the Third Reich (a law which was only reformed in 1969 and abolished in 1994). My Wonderful West Berlin takes its viewer through this time; to the activism and sexual freedom of the 1970s, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and the beginnings of techno up until the reunification of the city and the country.
Bringing together archival material with contemporary footage, Jochen Hick pays homage to a city whose bars, radical bookstores, and left-wing politics paved the way for new German attitudes toward liberation. It captures both the unabashed sexual energy of the city, as well as the complicated history of the LGBTQ+ community in Germany, where 'difference' remains an ongoing challenge. It suggests that in times when oppression, hate, and violence remain a real threat, audacious resistance is essential.
About the filmmaker:
Jochen Hick (1960) grew up in the Taunus region, in Munich and Stuttgart. He studied film from 1981 to 1987 at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (with Helke Sander and others) and in Bologna. Since graduating, he has worked as a film director, author, journalist and producer for cinema and television, specializing in socio-cultural, especially LGBTQ, issues. In 1994, he founded his own production company Galeria Alaska Productions and had produced numerous reports and documentaries for ARD, ZDF/ARTE, 3sat and Spiegel-TV, in addition to realizing his own material. From 2007 to 2010, Hick was also deputy program director and editor-in-chief at TIMM, the first TV station for gay men in the German-speaking world. Hick's films have been shown at over 300 international festivals and have been awarded the Förderpreis der Deutschen Filmkritik (1987) and the Teddy for Best Documentary (2003), among others.
Registration
Details
Online
Language: German with English subtitles