Hide and Seek
Undo
Moon , Pissing in the River, Watching it Rise
Dark Angels
Spoiled Identity
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29.11.18:00 – 22:00Screening, Movies
Step into a cinematic journey through resilience, transformation, and untold stories. This curated night features 7 evocative films by visionary artists who weave narratives of migration, queerness, healing, fantasy, and collective imagination. From speculative utopias and surreal rituals to post-Kardashian vampire dialogues, each piece offers a unique lens into the intimate, the magical, and the radical.
Hide and Seek (20 min)
by Alicja Wysocka und Vera Varlamova
Hide and Seek explores themes of resilience, imagination, and the reimagining of societal norms in a world of increasing precarity. Centered on a group of elderly women—former war migrants from Eastern Europe—the film delves into their personal stories and collective creativity to envision alternative futures. Through intimate storytelling and performative rituals, the women articulate their hopes and fears, crafting a narrative that blends memory, trauma, and speculative utopias. The film examines themes of migration, aging, and queerness while challenging the constraints of traditional family structures and capitalist systems.
Inspired by theatrical pioneers like Tadeusz Kantor, Konstantin Stanislavski, and Bertolt Brecht, Hide and Seek combines visuals with a layered narrative that interweaves communal dreaming, shared rituals, and acts of creative resistance. At its core, the film invites audiences to reflect on collective survival and the power of imagination as a tool for crafting more inclusive and sustainable futures.
director: Alicja Wysocka
camerawoman: Vera Varlamova
editing: Alicja Wysocka & Vera Varlamova
Liliia Chadaieva
Svitlana Gulevska
Oksana Plonska
Tamara Varlamova
Special thanks to: Schirn Kunsthalle, Städel Museum, Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt am Main, Hotel Nizza, Cafe Hemdhoch
Alicja Wysocka director, costume and set designer/ was born in Poland and works internationally. She graduated from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. She is an artist whose practice explores alternative economic models, commons, and collaborative, community-based forms of coexistence. Her work challenges conventional structures, proposing imaginative frameworks for collective living and shared prosperity. Through a multidisciplinary approach, she crafts projects that often function as collective therapeutic experiences, inviting audiences to critically reflect on societal norms and envision alternative futures.
Vera Varlamova translator, co-producer, cinematographer/ born in Kiev in 2000, currently lives in Frankfurt am Main. In 2017 she entered the National I. K. Karpenko-Kary National University of Theater and Cinema, Kyiv, where she studied traditional Chekhov/Stanislavsky performance models both in theory and in practice, until this was discontinued due to the increasing instability in the region. Since 2019 she has been studying Fine Art at the Städelschule in Judith Hopf’s class, where she currently works with film, photography and performance. Her artistic practice is deeply connected to community practice and socio-political engagement.
Undo (5 min)
by Nargess Behrouzian, Pooyesh Frozandeh
Undo is a short imaginary documentary compiling archive of untold stories about Neu Isenburg collected in a series of workshops with local participants.
Nargess Behrouzian is a choreographer,theater maker,writer and set designer. She merges her theater and visual arts background to create experimental choreography and multidisciplinary art. Nargess is passionate about merging archives, narration, documentaries, and visual art and movement. Her interests encompass archiving, documentary storytelling and exploring the body- related aspect. Through her work, she delves into the connection between the body, space ,object and narrative, crafting engaging experiences for her audience.
Pooyesh Frozandeh (1992 Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian theatre director, playwright, performer, choreographer and video artist (based in Berlin). With his play “Stone Rite” he won the Polish Grand Prix of the It-Self Festival in Warsaw in 2017 and the Jan Bocza-Szabowski Critics’ Prize.
He studied theatre directing at Soore University in Tehran and then completed a B.A. in theatre studies and art history at Ruhr University Bochum. He is currently studying choreography at the HZT in Berlin.
Moon (13 min)
by Beatrice Steimer
In Stalin’s birthplace, Gori, MOON unfolds as a hypnotic ritual of power, guilt, and forgiveness. A woman, echoing the presence of a Russian oligarch—and possibly Stalin reborn—presides over surreal ceremonies. Men in women’s clothing offer gifts and magical objects, torn between reverence and atonement. This experimental work blurs past and present in an enigmatic exploration of devotion and transformation.
Pissing in the River (4 min)
by Beatrice Steimer
Men healing men. A raw, haunting ritual, PISSING IN A RIVER follows a group of vampire-men torn between healing and devouring one of their own. Suspended between instinct and care, the ceremony becomes a visceral meditation on the fragility of connection and the pull of primal desires.
Watching it Rise (9 min)
by Beatrice Steimer
explores the liminal space between dreams and reality. A singing magician-like figure orchestrates the awakening of interconnected protagonists, especially one protagonist, whose visions blur and dissolve into one another. As one figure repeatedly awakens in an infinite loop, the film searches for clarity amid multilayered realities, linking themes of collective healing and rebirth woven across all three works.
Béatrice Steimer
A visionary filmmaker, author, photographer, fashion designer, and performance artist, Béatrice Steimer is a creative polymath based in Frankfurt. With a background shaped by studies at Städelschule, Villa Arson, and Jacques Lecoq, Steimer’s work delves into the realms of interspecies relationships, psychedelic experiences, and the art of creation itself. Her eclectic practice spans multiple disciplines, blending visual and performing arts into provocative, immersive experiences. Currently, Steimer’s focus is on exploring new forms of intimacy and community.
Dark Angels (56min)
by björnsonova
Three vampires engage in a conversation about the taste of blood, consent, medical care, and their personal turn-ons. This improvised post kardashian live-action role-playing scenario features three characters embodying contemporary archetypes that comment on mental health, activism, and aesthetics. You will meet the Emotional, Melancholic, and Activist Vampires.
Am I your blood type?
Come out of the coffin!
Vampires Among Us!
Vamp Rights Now!
Fake bleeding for trans vamps!
Free bleeding on the floors!
Synchronised Full Moon Bleeding Power!
Ask before you bite!
concept by : Nik Timková, Zuzana Žabková
performance by: Meave Johnson, Eva Priečková, Zuzana Žabková
camera by: Viktor Švolík, Jiří Straka
sound by: Imrich Pisarovič
music by: Karol Žabka
björnsonova is a project, a fictional character, a community and a dancing multi-body with roots and connections spread across time, places and art forms. This hybrid subjectivity recycles, multiplies and inverts practices, methods, objects, texts and bodies with each event that takes place in her name. They focus on the relationship between femme bodies and their environments in order to unleash fantasies about how this relationship can change.
Spoiled Identity (90 min)
by Yukiro Dravarious and D Whom (2023)
The bizarre adventure of siblings Ann and Ben Snordfelt, who have been sent to the Sensitivity Training Boot Camp where the principal, Mrs Schnapps, leads them through hardcore curriculum that allows them to become deplorable and effeminate. To make matters even more chaotic, a militant religious group is attempting to infiltrate the academy and spread the teachings of The New Nuntament. Who will win the battle and how will the Snordfelt siblings fare?
Meanwhile, a letter of revelations from the Foundress of the STBC, Lady Deplorah, to her enigmatic daughter, Lady Robertah, holds some of the answers to the various misadventures that have plagued the lives of those caught up in the idiosyncratic machinations of the institution …
D Whom, AKA Léon Charmé, a shapeshifting Delicate Delinquent of the Tokyo queer cabaret scene, brings chameleon wiles and a unique brand of ‘burlesque meets butoh’ to his work as a performer, director, videographer and writer. Originally from the east of England, he has made Kamakura his home. Taking inspiration from the Grotesque and the Sublime, he pops up at various insalubrious dives in and around Tokyo and his work has appeared in Perform Istanbul and as part of the Volcana Brainstorm installation at the 2020 Yokohama Triennale. He also collaborated with Yukiro Dravarious previously on the underground horror flick, Girl Goned.
Yukiro Dravarious, a dark glamour Drag Queen from depths of Tokyo who goes under the name: Nattmara! Yukiro has been making outrageous movies since his teens and has three full-lengths and numerous shorts under his skirt. Originally from rural Sweden, he has established a reputation in the goth and horror scenes in Tokyo by organizing some legendary club events and stage shows. He also sings in the retro 80s electronic synth pop duo Denanoma.
Credits
Projects supported by Stadt Frankfurt am Main - Referat für internationale Angelegenheiten
Kulturamt der Stadt Frankfurt am Main
Stadt Frankfurt am Main - Referat für internationale Angelegenheiten
Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Kunst und Kultur
Frauenreferat
Deutsch-Tschechischer Zukunftsfonds
Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt am Main
Hessische Theaterakademie




















