For the second consecutive year, CYPHER welcomes PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE, a three-day film program that explores 100 years of resistance, pleasure, and desire through the lens of women and queer filmmakers. Following the success of the first edition, this year’s program returns from December 19 to 21, 2025, with an even broader theme, focusing on queer spaces—private or public—that are highlighted as literal and metaphorical scenes to be viewed.

Whether these spaces are internal, such as the safe haven sought by Eve Harrington in Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers and the sacred spaces that allow the women of Transit to transform themselves physically; or external, such as the streets occupied by the FIREFLIES and Betty as cars speed past them. All these spaces, safe or not, are often associated with a performance. The performers in SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS are exposed on stage and under bright lights for a non-existent audience to “see” them. While the character in Sore Throat hides in a queer bar in the Philippines, existing only through sound, the characters in MONSTERA express their eroticism locked inside, like animals in captivity.

A sense of devastation and profound loneliness seems to define the contours of this performance. The characters, however glamorous and seductive they may be, remain strangers. Like the iconic Sie in Ticket of No Return, who wanders around West Berlin drinking until she loses consciousness—an oblivion that Betty also seeks by working the streets, one block after another, male after male, while admitting that all she wants is to be truly loved for who she is. A quest not unlike that expressed by many black men in Tongues Untied, who feel marginalized both in a homophobic black community and in a white gay subculture poisoned by racism.

The eccentric, outrageous, and electric beings that these characters are should not be taken as mere resilience. Their lives constitute an authentic and multidimensional resistance to an often harsh reality of increased violence—economic, legislative, and social. Their performances are not just a means of attracting attention, but an attempt to draw attention to a much broader issue.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Something for the Boys, 2018

The program for the second edition of PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE includes art films, exploitation films, documentaries, experimental video workshops, and other innovative formats, as well as early films with exclusively female and queer casts from around the world, from the 1930s to the present day. Although the films deal with issues of homophobia, stigmatization of prostitution, racism, patriarchy, sexism, oppression, classism, and violence in a truly queer way, they are never lacking in absurdity, rebellion, honesty, emotion, joy, and sex. Beyond the historical and artistic significance of the films, the selection of this program is a necessity at a time when dangerous rhetoric and policies of discrimination are reemerging, fueled by conservative ideologies that demonize minorities. The mere existence of certain people becomes a field of confrontation and, as a result, art that depicts these lives and people functions de facto as an act of disobedience.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

FRIDAY 19/12 – 19:00

SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS – Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, 2018 (United Kingdom), 16’

Ticket of No Return – UIrike Ottinger’s, 1979 (Germany), 107’

SATURDAY 20/12 – 19:00

FIREFLIES (Lucciole) – Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative, 2021 (Italy/France), 7’ Scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers – Robert Kaplan, 1972 (USA), 82’

SUNDAY 21/12 – 18:00

Sore Throat – Bugarin & Castle (Davide Bugarin & Angel Cohn Castle), 2023 (Philipinnes/Scotland), 20’

MONSTERA – Vera Chotzoglou, 2021 (Greece), 12’

Tongues Untied – Marlon Riggs, 1989 (USA ), 54’

Mπέττυ – Δημήτρης Σταυράκας, 1979 (Greece), 33’

During the three days of the festival (at-1 floor)

Transit (Lola in Delphi, Jane, Delta Lumineux, Season of magic) – Twin Automat (Sandrine Cheyrol & Irini Karayannopoulou), 2024 (France/Greece), 2’

PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE is an initiative by Sofia Kouloukouri and Alexios Seilopoulos (Escalating Panic). It began as research into the artistic practices of various subcultures and their own ways of producing films. The first edition of PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE took place on November 1–3, 2024, at CYPHER and included short and feature-length films from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that explored “camp,” “punk,” and “no wave” trends in independent cinema in Europe and the United States. Since then, the program has evolved into a much broader investigation of how non-normative attitudes and forms of gender resistance have been depicted in cinema from the early 20th century to the present day, even before the emergence of terms such as queer.