desired! – film lust and queer

Dr Natascha Frankenberg is a film and media scholar. She currently works as a research assistant at the Institute for Media Studies at Ruhr Universität Bochum. Her academic work also focuses on queer-feminist topics. Her dissertation was published in 2021 under the title »Queere Zeitlichkeiten in dokumentarischen Filmen« by transcript Verlag and is available Open Access.
At the IFFF she is responsible for the section for queer film: begehrt!

Karin Michalski works as a film and video art curator, artist and lecturer. She studied film directing and production at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). Her curatorial work includes the contribution to the Rhizome Film History of the DFF (Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum) Queer Cinema – “counter-narratives” and cinematic experiments, as well as the ongoing exhibition project An Unhappy Archive and the queer-feminist film and video art program series clipclub (in collaboration with Renate Lorenz, among others). She curates screenings and events such as “I Must Go. Tomorrow” with Ming Wong (Neuer Berliner Kunstverein), STILL IN TOUCH on queer friendships and poetic ways of resistance (district, Berlin), FEELING BAD for the Swiss Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia and the symposium House of Memories. Queer and Postcolonial Approaches to the Past (Academy of Media Arts Cologne).
She has participated in numerous festivals and exhibitions with her film and video works, including The Alphabet of Feeling Bad (a collaboration with theorist Ann Cvetkovich), Working On It, Monika M., Pashke and Sofia and women videoletters – a second text on war and globalization. Her collaborative projects include the artists’ edition An Unhappy Archive (Edition Fink, Zurich) and the book I is for Impasse. Affective Queer Connections in Theory_Activism_Art (bbooks, Berlin).

Lisa Tracy Michalik is an author, media and culture studies scholar, curator and co-founder as well as editor of defrag zines. She studied media cultural studies and media cultural analysis with a focus on audiovisual media and lives and works between Düsseldorf and Berlin. She is particularly interested in films that play with expectations and conventions, that take visual and narrative risks, in which the form reflects the content or films that subvert genre boundaries. She sees her writing and her practice as decidedly queer and located in an Afro-diasporic tradition. She writes prose, poetry, experimental text formats and screenplays and is interested in themes such as memory, desire, pop culture, Queerness and Blackness. She is part of the Writers Room of Lamin Leroy Gibba’s series Schwarze Früchte, which celebrated its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in June 2024 and has been broadcast in the ARD Mediathek since October 2024. Her texts and reviews can be found in Sisters and Souls 2 (Orlanda Verlag, ed. Natasha A. Kelly), In Liebe von (Shift Books, ed. Helena Melikova), Parabolis Virtualis 3 (Querverlag, ed. Noah Anderson and Kevin Junk), taz, Missy Magazine, wormhole Newspaper and defrag zine, among others.