Saturday, June 28th 2025
11am-7pm
@Stadtgalerie Bern

Block 1 11:00 AM
◊ Pink Narcissus (1971, James Bidgood)

Lunch Break 12:15–1:15 PM

Block 2 1:15 PM
◊ Hide and Seek (1996, Su Friedrich)
◊ An Untitled Portrait (1993, Cheryl Dunye)
◊ L Is for the Way You Look (1991, Jean Carlomusto)

Coffee Break 3:00–3:30 PM

Block 3 3:30 PM
◊ The Attendant (1993, Isaac Julien)
◊ Bloodsisters (1995, Michelle Handelman)

Apéro 5:00–6:00 PM

Block 4 6:00–7:00 PM
◊ It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971, Rosa von Praunheim)


 As an extension of the exhibition “In the Closet” (Li Tavor, Stadtgalerie Bern), this one-day film program brings together a collection of works that explore the shifting boundaries between visibility and invisibility, private and public space, desire and self-determination. Each film reflects on the ways queer identities have been shaped, hidden, expressed, and reclaimed—whether through personal memory and archival fragments (L Is For The Way You Look, Hide and Seek), through dreamlike fantasies (Pink Narcissus), or via radical political discourse (Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers…).

From the museum as a site of queer historical entanglement and colonial legacies (The Attendant) to the underground leatherdyke scene of the 1990s (Bloodsisters), the films trace the complex interplay between cultural codes, self-representation, and subversion.

Like the exhibition, the program moves between concealment and revelation, oppression and liberation, ultimately highlighting the resilience, creativity, and defiance that have long defined queer lives and communities.

Anchored in the 1990s and framed by two post-Stonewall classics, the program drifts through imagined pasts and queer recollections. These films echo the curators own growing up in the 1990s, when the “closet” felt less like a metaphor than a quiet, porous space one moved through without knowing its name.