For this week’s film tip, we would like to recommend a new exhibition on movies rather than one specific film, simply because it is quite remarkable in its execution.

„Inventing Queer Cinema“ is an exhibition and film programme running at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin until 13 September 2026.

As the name suggests, the exhibition explores queer cinema in all its aspects – from its very beginnings and key figures to its role in today’s cinematic landscape. Importantly, the Deutsche Kinemathek does not claim completeness in presenting queer cinema and its invention. Instead, it emphasises that this history should be understood as an ongoing process that continues to evolve today. The exhibition takes place in the vast halls of a former electrical substation and includes a textile archive featuring original costume pieces such as Marlene Dietrich’s iconic top hat and cigarette case. Special tribute is paid to Manfred Salzgeber, a film distributor who spent a lifetime advocating for queer rights and bringing queer stories to cinema screens across Germany and beyond.

A timeline documents and highlights key moments in the evolution of queer cinema history: from the world’s first explicit homosexual film, „Anders als die Andern“ by Richard Oswald in 1919, to the first lesbian kiss in a Hollywood film in „Morocco“ (1930), and the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Films such as Westler and Zimmer 303 demonstrate cinematically how deeply the epidemic affected the gay community.

Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexual acts, was only abolished in 1994 (!), followed 22 years later by the first Academy Award for a queer film, „Moonlight“.

The timeline concludes with studies indicating a decline in LGBTQ representation in US films due to a political backlash against diversity in 2025/26.

Three huge screens positioned side by side show excerpts from a wide range of films connected to queer history, creating an all-encompassing experience. Combined with hanging posters, information boards, quotations and portraits suspended from the ceiling, the exhibition’s curation conveys queer cinema’s quiet omnipresence. Once inside, you do not know where to look or what to read first, and slowly realise just how much there is – and has always been – just beyond the boundaries of mainstream attention.

„Inventing Queer Cinema“ successfully highlights the hopes, struggles and achievements of actors, film distributors and directors such as Chussein Erkenow, who personally smuggled his film „100 Tage, Genosse Soldat“ by train from Moscow to Germany after it had been strictly banned in Russia.

The exhibition impressively showcases the resilience of queer figures, while also revealing the beauty that can emerge from pain and hardship, leading to such special movies.

The Deutsche Kinemathek also has a studio cinema at its disposal, screening a variety of queer films daily as part of the exhibition.

The weekly corresponding programme can be found here.

 

Tokyo, 1936: Sada Abe, a former prostitute, suffocates her lover during sex and, in order to finally possess him and his sexuality entirely, cuts off his genitals. At her arrest a couple of days later, his penis was still found in her kimono. It was a crime that shook the whole country.

Shocking to most, the case became the inspiration for the defining work of Nagisa Oshima. The director is known as one of the most infamous figures of the Japanese New Wave. He wrote and directed „Im Reich der Sinne“ (In the Realm of the Senses), a film that tells the brutally fascinating story of this couple.

Sada Abe begins a new job as a housemaid for Kichizō Ishida, with whom she quickly starts an affair. At first, she still shares him with his wife, but Sada soon claims sole ownership over Kichizō and his body. Plot-wise, this is mostly it: over the span of 105 minutes, the viewer is confronted with countless (unsimulated!) sex scenes, which become almost metaphorical through their excessive repetition.

What changes is the dynamic. Sada’s complete dedication to her employer initially feels almost upsetting from a feminist perspective, as her portrayal quickly shifts into that of an insatiably aroused nymphomaniac. Kichizō seems amused by it at first. But he soon becomes completely captivated by her as she demands his promise to sleep exclusively with her, and the two begin testing sexual boundaries by choking each other during the act. It is here that the dynamic shifts entirely, and he becomes nothing more than a willing surrender to her desires.

Isolated and unconcerned with the rest of the world, the two spiral deeper and deeper into a space of obsession, ownership, freedom and pain in such a radical manner that it eventually becomes almost claustrophobic to watch.

The traditional Japanese clothing of the period, paired with Minoru Miki’s beautifully composed score, creates a captivating cultural contrast to the horrors unfolding on screen.

„Im Reich der Sinne“ had to be cut and edited further in France, as no Japanese film laboratory dared to work with material this explicit. At its first screening at the Berlinale in 1976, the film was immediately confiscated. After careful investigation, it was ultimately not deemed pornography and was screened again in 1977.

Often misunderstood, a restored version of the film is now being shown in German cinemas to mark its 50th anniversary.

Whether it is a good film or not, what remains revolutionary, then and now, is Oshima’s insistence on portraying desire as a radical act in itself. With a movie that probably contains more sex scenes than almost any other, he paradoxically manages to depict sex in a non-sexual way, instead using it to explore the concepts of desire and the point at which love meets morbid obsession.

„Im Reich der Sinne“ will be screened in German cinemas from 11 June.

Tabatha lives on her ranch in the heart of the Badlands, the vast plains of South Dakota. Despite financial difficulties, she welcomes rebellious teenagers and shares her passion for horses with them, offering them more than just a home. Together, they train the horses, teaching them the magic and grace of rodeo. She describes it as “reinventing the American West.” Things get tumultuous when a rancher from a neighboring county offers to buy Tabatha’s ranch.

The film’s synopsis is captivating to begin with, accompanied by beautiful shots of America’s vast, open landscapes. What makes it even more compelling is how close it is to reality: five of the actors, including the main characters, play themselves on their very own horse ranch.

Director Kate Beecroft, perhaps known for „As Long as You Are Mine“ or „6 Underground“, found the story by accident. She and Austin Shelton, a friend and director of photography, were on a road trip in a van, searching for an inspiring subject. After taking a wrong turn in South Dakota, they met a woman who told them about Tabatha Zimiga and invited them to visit her ranch. They went – and what followed was a three-year-long period of research and immersion.

Beecroft lived with the family, observing their daily lives and teaching them how to act. Despite some performance experience through rodeo riding, they had no formal acting background, yet deliver remarkably convincing performances in the film. Beecroft also brought in professional actors alongside non-professionals, creating a unique dynamic on set that even led to improvised scenes.

The result is a magical film, suspended somewhere between reality and fiction, portraying the quiet resilience of women by deeply intertwining their lives with animals and nature.

The New West (East of Wall) will be released in German cinemas on 4 June 2026.

Opening the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma marks Jane Schoenbrun’s return to the terrain: adolescence as horror mythology, movies as emotional habitat where there are endless fried chicken and candy. The film observes how identity is something performed through cultural debris rather than discovered naturally – the question of whether that has always been like that remains open. The film follows Kris, played by Hannah Einbinder, a filmmaker attempting to resurrect the long-abandoned Camp Miasma slasher franchise, where Little Dead butchers teenagers in the woods. Kris is eager to find Billy Presley, the Camp Miasma series’ original “final girl,” portrayed by Gillian Anderson. Billy is an eerie combination of sexiness, detachment and exhaustion.

Anderson is wonderfully in her element, eccentric, impeccably stylish, and sharp with a mischievous smile. Billy lives at Camp Miasma, where the final movie was shot. She moves through the film like the opposite (or alter ego) of Kris, whispering to her to stop intellectualizing herself into paralysis. Camp Miasma is simple, she says, it’s all about “flesh and fluid”.

It turns out Schoenbrun/Kris is not interested in reviving slasher iconography nostalgically. The genre becomes a framework through which to explore queer longing, aging, bodily alienation, and the strange violence of acute self-awareness. The film with its modernized trash aesthetics is on point. Fluorescent junk food, VHS textures, candy wrappers, processed colors: companions to teenage desires and fantasies.

Schoenbrun joyfully pushes the boundaries into the kitsch and grindhouse aesthetics making their second Cannes appearance very enjoyable and worth watching.
Oh and, that Arthur Conti: why is he so good at playing those mysterious freaks?

 

The film will be released theatrically in Germany in August.

“Palästina 36“ taps into the early origins of the ongoing conflict in Palestine in 1936. As Jews were persecuted in Germany and wider Europe, the British mandate authorities supported increased Jewish immigration to Palestine, framing it at times as a refuge, while tensions on the ground were already escalating.

Palestinian director Anne Marie Jacir zooms in on the fate of one village, Al-Basma. Yusuf Al Bassawi (Karim Daoud Anaya), born and raised there, works as a driver for publisher Amir Atef (Dhafer L’Abidine) in Jerusalem. Over the course of the 119-minute film, the audience witnesses his inner conflict between his life in the city, his roots in Al-Basma, and the differing political convictions around him. After a shocking incident, Yusuf decides to join the rebellion and fight for Palestine.

What follows is a depiction of Palestine at the height of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, in which Palestinians resisted British colonial rule and increasing Zionist settlement.

Told through the perspectives and fates of different protagonists and families, the stories are connected by a shared sense of hope and resilience despite the surrounding violence.

The imagery is often quiet, leaving space for the wide, almost mythical landscapes of Palestine, but also for the erupting violence and brutality of the British authorities and Zionist militias.

Jacir and her team reconstructed parts of the village of Al-Basma in order to film on original locations and better capture the atmosphere of the land. Following the events of 7 October 2023, production was temporarily relocated to Jordan, before returning 13 months later to the original filming sites. This makes it the only film production in Palestine within the past two years, turning it into a symbol of cultural resilience.

The closing scene could just as well belong to the present: protesters marching through the streets, chanting and waving the Palestinian flag.

An exceptional film of strong political relevance for anyone seeking to understand Palestinian suffering and the historical roots of the ongoing conflict.

 

„Palästina 36“ will be screened in German cinemas from Thursday, 14 May 2026

onwards.

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival last year, Love Me Tender reframes intimacy through rupture rather than romance. Clémence, a lawyer, leaves her marriage in an attempt to step into a more truthful version of herself, a decision that quietly detonates the structure of her family life. What follows is not liberation in any cinematic sense, but a slow unravelling, as her ex-husband turns custody into a site of control, drawing their son Paul into a conflict he cannot fully understand.

The film resists dramatics, instead observing the erosion of a maternal bond with an almost clinical stillness. There are no villains in the traditional sense, only shifting allegiances and the subtle violence of influence. Clémence’s relationship with her son becomes increasingly fragile, shaped by absence, miscommunication, and the quiet manipulation that happens off-screen as much as on it. Emotion is never performed outright; it accumulates in silences, in withheld gestures, in the growing distance between bodies that once felt instinctively close.

What lingers is the film’s refusal to simplify its central question: what does it mean to choose yourself when that choice comes at the cost of being seen as a mother? Love Me Tender doesn’t offer resolution, only the uneasy suggestion that self-realisation and care are not always compatible. In its muted, observational style, the film turns tenderness into something unstable, no longer a given, but something that can be reshaped, withheld, or lost altogether.

Watch it in German theatres May 7th.

Nearly two decades after The Devil Wears Prada defined the cultural imagination of fashion media, its sequel returns to a radically transformed industry. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, print legacy collides with digital immediacy, and influence is no longer dictated solely from the editor’s desk. Meryl Streep reprises Miranda Priestly with undiminished precision, now navigating a landscape shaped by metrics, virality, and shifting authority.

Across from her, Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs re-enters the frame not as an outsider, but as someone who has learned to operate within the system she once questioned. Their dynamic evolves into something sharper, less mentorship, more ideological clash mirroring a broader generational tension within fashion itself. The film trades naïveté for self-awareness, asking what it means to succeed in an industry where reinvention is constant and authenticity increasingly performative.

Visually, the sequel embraces contrast: archival elegance against contemporary minimalism, with a wardrobe that articulates identity as much as ambition. If the original captured the seduction of fashion’s inner circle, this chapter interrogates its sustainability creative, cultural, and personal. The Devil Wears Prada 2 doesn’t just revisit a familiar world; it reframes it for a moment where relevance is both currency and question.

In German theatres April 30th.