Professional provocateur and artist Maven Shegula has returned to Berlin after a hiatus in Zürich. She’s back to celebrate her 50th birthday, and to appear on a popular German talk show. As she wanders the streets of Berlin with her girlfriend and friend, it becomes apparent that being an artist in this city is no longer acceptable. The humming nightlife has disappeared, and the vibrant creative community pushed to the margins of society. The film is alive with tension, both sexual and otherwise. As Maven’s story unfolds on live television, we learn about her son, her politics, her heritage, and her alter-ego Rosa who champions radical self-expression and feminism. The interview is dispersed with beautiful volcanic eruptions from Maven that act as both a denunciation of the city’s leadership and a love letter to Berlin.
In the middle of the Colombian coffee region, Aribada, the resurrected monster, meets Las Traviesas, a group of indigenous transwomen from the Emberá tribes. The magical, the dreamlike and the performative coexist in their unique world - an aesthetic and spiritual universe in which documentary and fiction merge into a transcultural narrative. Enchanted by the beauty and power of their jais (spirits), Aribada decides to join Las Traviesas in creating their own trans*futurist community.
An artist penetrates him/herself with a cob of transgenic corn in the middle of a field, unawares that death is near. His/her sister Ana, who has been following him/her with his/her ashes, embarks on a journey into the Amazon forest that will become a quest as spiritual as it is erotic.
It is the year 2060 and AIDS has been eradicated. However, in some, the HIV virus has now mutated into a gene from which a drug can be produced that has become the white powder of the twenty-first century. With a virtually supported scanning system, secret police are trying to identify anyone who carries this gene. Filmed in Berlin, Taiwan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s science fiction dystopia revolves around a struggle to gain control over the production and exploitation of bodily fluids. Her film is like an orgiastic opera; a breathless round of bodies, secretions, performances and sexual acts often performed in the service of an overriding economy. An unusual, largely experimental and deliberately parapornographic drama in which the borders between the sexes as well as homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans- or intersexual are constantly blurred.