Paul Poet

Don’t dream it, be it: The Act of Killing goes Gender Frenzy. The battlefield is gender identity. Monika Donner is a transsexual elite soldier, a poster figure for gender rights and an author on the extreme right wing of the political spectrum. Quickly she, who used to be he, becomes a solitary warrior caught between the ideological fronts. A psychedelically political psychogram as an intensive cinematic collage.

Two Persons. One Tape. One Interview. No Cuts. No tricks. One of the most brutal and disturbing pieces of oral history. Florence Burnier-Bauer was born in Paris in 1949 to an upper middle-class family with Russian roots. Raped by her Granddad at an early age and passed around in secret men’s circles, she was hushed by electro-shocks in the insane asylum. Then she fled to the bohemian hobo lifestyle of the swinging sixties, taking off to a life of crime, bringing up three children on the road. Searched by the French police, she thought to find a safe haven in the free-loving Austrian Friedrichshof-Commune, led by Actionist Artist Otto Mühl. That is where hell really began. In 1989 Florence was able to escape. Her court appearance brought Mühl to jail for pedophilia, rape and orchestrated abuse. Her story is a highly unsettling testimonial about a time, known for its social liberalization. It is a showdown with counterculture icon Otto Mühl, previous documentaries had only hinted at. And a disturbing chronic to a shattered but unbroken life. And a ground-shaking mirror to the shadows behind the years of the post-war European Witschaftswunder, that shows how fascist structures and thinking was able to silently live on in the social underneath, even of the extreme left. A MeToo-Film.

Handmade utopias — a filmic search for the worldwide phenomenon of the micronation movement. Do-it-yourself states that have distanced themselves from the economic and political mainstreaming of globalization. A road movie covering land, water and the wildest realms of the imagination. Simultaneously creative documentary and pulsating cultural portrait, the film traces a new ​“unplugged” generation — their motives, their anxieties and their dreams. A film that shows how this generation realizes its escapist fantasies in new economic and political forms and how they collide with oppressive everyday realities.

World Distribution: Films Transit, Canada (since 2014:) New Docs, Germany

FOREIGNERS OUT! SCHLINGENSIEFS CONTAINER is a thrilling, insightful, funny chronicle and reflection of one of he biggest public pranks and acts of art terrorism ever committed. Austria 2000: Right after the FPÖ under Jörg Haider had become part of the government, the first time an extreme right wing party became state officials after WW2, infamous German shock director Christoph Schlingensief showed a very unique form of protest. Realising public xenophobia and the new hate politics in the most drastic ways possible, he installed a public concentration camp right in the middle of Vienna´s touristic heart, right beside the pittoresque opera where hundreds of tourists and locals pass by daily. And it was no concentration camp you had ever feared to return from the old times, but one that cynically reflected our new multimedia culture. Satirising reality TV shows, ​“Big Brother” especially, a dozen asylum seekers were surveilled by a multitude of cameras, could be fed and watched by passer-by´s and two were thrown out of country through web-voting per day. The way fascism looks in the 21st century: Bright. Sensational. Interactive. Funny…and frightening. Austria freaked out. Thousands of screaming people gathered. Attacks with knifes, beatings, acid occurred. Political intrigues. Headlines all over Europe. 800.000 worldwide joined via internet. An incredibly heated week, capturing the European right-wing drift in real time. Democracy the hard way.

An experimental 1990s Grunge Rock Horror Fantasy. Kenneth Anger meets
Dario Argento meets Aerosmith featuring cult musicians like the Melvins and
Neurosis. A paranoid girly girl, cross of Alicia Silverstone and Courtney Love,
is plagued by visions of marriage, parenthood, getting solid, flees her sleep
chamber to join an urban dystopia of punks and hoodlums, getting chased,
caught and finding no freedom after all. So much for teen spirit revolution.