Our curation team is getting reinforcements! It is in the festival’s DNA to offer a platform for queer themes in film. Identity issues beyond heterosexuality are attracting growing interest from both audiences and film producers. We are therefore delighted to be organising the popular section desired! – film lust & queer section under the direction of Natascha Frankenberg. With Karin Michalski and Lisa Tracy Michalik, two experts will strengthen the queer perspectives of the festival as a whole. With this expanded team, we want to create a diversity of voices that will find expression in challenging and yet connectable, unique programmes.

The film and video art curator, artist and lecturer Karin Michalski studied film directing and production at the DFFB. Her curatorial work includes the contribution to the Rhizom Filmgeschichte of the DFF Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum Queer Cinema – ‘counter-narratives’ and cinematic experiments, as well as the ongoing exhibition project An Unhappy Archive. (more)

Lisa Tracy Michalik is an author, media culture scholar, curator and co-founder and editor of defrag zines. She studied media cultural studies and media cultural analysis with a focus on audiovisual media. She sees her writing and her practice as decidedly queer and located in an Afro-diasporic tradition. She is part of the Writers Room of the series Black Fruits by Lamin Leroy Gibba (ARD Mediathek). (more).