Sapphic Summer Dreams at Kino in der Reitschule Presents Nitrate Kisses

Wednesday, August 21st, 8:30pm

Kino in der Reitschule

Bern, Switzerland

Image from Nitrate Kisses - feature length film by Barbara Hammer

 

It’s time again for a few really warm summer nights in the courtyard of the riding school. After “Hot Boy Summer” 2022, this year it’s “Sapphic Summer Dreams” : filmmaking by women-loving directors before the turn of the millennium on the open air screen!

The film series shows The Watermelon Woman, a half-documentary, half-autobiographical feature film by Cheryl Dunye. In it, Dunye, who plays herself, researches a nameless black actress of the 1930s and 40s, simply called “Watermelon Woman”. Her search also becomes a search for her own identity. Dunye’s film is considered a milestone of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s.

A week later, there is queer historiography par excellence. Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses shows traces of lesbian love through time with plenty of poetry and touchingly intimate images. Simultaneously sexy, erotic and confrontational, Hammer’s work moves on the border between truth and fiction, memory and history, opening up a new conceptualization of LGBT+ biographies and visual history.

Finally, we show Portrait of a Drinker by the German director Ulrike Ottinger. In it, the protagonist creates a kind of drinking plan using an advertising brochure given to her as in-flight reading material by a friendly stewardess. Berlin, a city that is completely foreign to her, seems like the right place for her to live out her passion undisturbed. Her passion is to drink, to live to drink, to live drinking, the life of a drinker. So now is the time to make it all happen.

In bad weather, the screenings will take place in the cinema.