“Pleasure & Disobedience 2”: The Three-Day Film Programme Returns to CYPHER

For the second consecutive year, CYPHER hosts “PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE,” a three-day film programme that explores 100 years of resistance, pleasure, and desire through the lens of women and queer filmmakers.

This year’s programme returns from 19 to 21 December with an expanded thematic focus on queer spaces, private or public, that emerge as literal and metaphorical stages for display.

Whether these spaces are interior, such as the safe haven sought by Eve Harrington in Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers or the sacred spaces that allow the women in Transit to undergo bodily transformation; or exterior, such as the streets occupied by the FIREFLIES and “Betty” as cars speed past them, these spaces, safe or unsafe, are often linked to performance. In SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS, performers expose themselves on stage under harsh lights for an absent audience to “see” them. While the character in Sore Throat hides in queer bars in the Philippines, existing only through sound, the characters in MONSTERA express their eroticism locked indoors, like animals in captivity.

A sense of crushing isolation and profound loneliness seems to define the contours of this performance. The characters, however dazzling and seductive, remain strangers. Like the iconic Sie in Ticket of No Return, who wanders through West Berlin drinking until she loses consciousness, a state of oblivion also sought by “Betty,” working the streets block by block, man by man, while admitting that all she truly wants is to be loved for who she is. A search not unlike that expressed by many Black men in Tongues Untied, who feel marginalised both within a homophobic Black community and within a white gay subculture poisoned by racism.

The eccentric, outrageous, and electric existence of these characters should not be read merely as resilience. Their lives constitute an authentic, multidimensional resistance to a frequently harsh reality of escalating violence – economic, legislative, and social. Their performances are not simply a way to attract attention, but an attempt to redirect it toward a much broader issue.

The second edition of “PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE” features 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, spanning from the 1930s to the present. While the films engage with themes such as homophobia, the stigmatisation of sex work, racism, patriarchy, sexism, oppression, classism, and violence, they do so in a genuinely queer way – never lacking absurdity, rebelliousness, honesty, emotion, joy, and sex.

Beyond their historical and artistic significance, the selection of this programme emerges as a necessity at a time when dangerous discriminatory rhetoric and policies are resurfacing, fuelled by conservative ideologies that demonise minorities. The very existence of certain people becomes a site of confrontation and, consequently, the art that documents these lives functions de facto as an act of disobedience.

Screening Programme

FRIDAY 19/12 – 19:00

• SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS – Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, 2018 (UK), 16’
• Ticket of No Return – Ulrike Ottinger, 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 – Davide Bugarin & Angel Cohn Castle, 2023 (Philippines/Scotland), 20’
• MONSTERA – Vera Chotzoglou, 2021 (Greece), 12’
• Tongues Untied – Marlon Riggs, 1989 (USA), 54’
• Betty – Dimitris Stavrakas, 1979 (Greece), 33’

ALL THREE DAYS (at -1)

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

Film Notes

SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, 2018 (UK), 16’
An art film exploring the political clash between the Victorian seaside resort of Blackpool and its gay scene. A single-channel video installation with multichannel sound. The artists are represented by Arcadia Missa gallery. SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS has been exhibited internationally, including at the Hayward Gallery.

Ticket of No Return

Ulrike Ottinger, 1979 (Germany), 107’
A glamorous woman arrives in West Berlin, drinks incessantly, and forms a relationship with another woman in Ulrike Ottinger’s humorous and visually striking odyssey. Considered the first film of Ottinger’s “Berlin Trilogy,” alongside Freak Orlando and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press. The film examines how women’s public behaviour is policed more strictly than men’s. Sie travels to Berlin with the sole aim of drinking herself into oblivion.

FIREFLIES (Lucciole)

Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative, 2021 (Italy/France), 7’
Founded in 2020, the Feel Good Cooperative was created to support sex workers in Rome during the first pandemic lockdown. Filmed on the outskirts of Rome—once home to fireflies, now crossed by a motorway—the film follows the irregular glow of sex workers illuminated by passing headlights, offering a nocturnal, nostalgic glimpse of these modern fireflies, their corsets, vinyl boots, flames, and sorrows.

Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers

Robert Kaplan, 1972 (USA), 82’
In this forgotten, delirious musical extravaganza, Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn plays Eve Harrington, a small-town girl from Kansas trying to make it—or at least find a roommate—in New York. One of the earliest films structured around a trans protagonist, it is a comic tour de force, following Woodlawn’s roles in Trash and Women in Revolt!.

Sore Throat

Davide Bugarin & Angel Cohn Castle, 2023 (Philippines/Scotland), 20’
A transformed character wanders through a glittering midnight world as sound and music travel from rural Luzon to Manila’s queer district of Malate. The film explores how sound permeates walls and shapes queer spaces through colonial distortions, mythology, and urban gentrification. Drawing on Filipino folklore around the Aswang, the work examines how colonial narratives weaponised monstrosity against femininity and queerness. The film and its live performance were presented at Tate Modern and ICA London in 2025.

MONSTERA

Vera Chotzoglou, 2021 (Greece), 12’
Monstera deliciosa becomes a symbol of interior confinement during COVID lockdowns. Time dissolves in a delirious inner landscape of idle bodies, captive animals, lightning, orgasmic scenes, a preparing luchador, and an Athenian balcony.

Tongues Untied

Marlon Riggs, 1989 (USA), 54’
“Break the nation’s violent silence on sexual and racial difference.” This radical blend of documentary and performance challenges stigma around Black gay sexuality, asserting that liberation is impossible while shame persists. A landmark of the 1980s culture wars.

Betty

Dimitris Stavrakas, 1979 (Greece), 33’
A hybrid short film combining documentary and fiction, portraying 24 hours in the life of a trans woman. Based on the autobiography of Betty Vakaliadou—writer, actress, former sex worker, and early trans rights activist—it is a rare and vital work in Greek cinema.

Transit

Twin Automat (Sandrine Cheyrol & Irini Karayannopoulou), 2024 (France/Greece), 2’
Across interconnected vignettes—Jane Fonda’s knee as a puppet, a cabaret dancer at Delphi, lunar faces inhabiting softness—Transit explores sensuality, spirituality, female energy, and perpetual transformation.

Biographical Notes

“PLEASURE & DISOBEDIENCE” is an initiative by Sofia Kouloukouri and Alexios Seilopoulos (Escalating Panic). First presented in November 2024 at CYPHER, the programme has since expanded into a broad investigation of non-normative gender resistance in cinema from the early 20th century to today.

Sofia Kouloukouri is a visual artist, performer, filmmaker, and art historian, with postgraduate studies in film, fine arts, and art history. Her feminist, sex-positive research focuses on art and sex as sites of conflict between gender, idealism, recognition, and exploitation. Her academic book Artistes Femmes et Travail du Sexe was published in 2025.

Alexios Seilopoulos (Escalating Panic) is a brand strategist, creative director, and curator, founder of the London-based agency Apropos. His curatorial work addresses LGBTQ+ histories, urban identity, and social justice. He lives between London and Athens and is a visiting lecturer at Beyond Studio HQ.