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Filmhuis Cavia

Van Hallstraat 52
Amsterdam
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Past events in Filmhuis Cavia

  1. The Watermelon Woman

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    The Watermelon Woman

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    The Watermelon Woman is a landmark of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, a time of queer formal experimentation with cinematic language. These mostly low-budget indie features were characterised by excess, irreverence and the revolutionary cynicism of the AIDS period. The first feature film of Cheryl Dunye, and the first ever feature film directed by a Black lesbian, it stars Dunye as Cheryl, a young Black lesbian working a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about Fae Richards, a Black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical "mammy" roles relegated to Black actresses during the period. A special screening on a special day!

  2. Pamela fundraiser screening

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Pamela fundraiser screening

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    We are honoured to share Shu Lea Cheang’s monumental 1994 sci-fi debut, Fresh Kill, as part of the ongoing fundraising efforts to support our friends and neighbours at Pamela, a queer bar in Amsterdam West.

    Shu Lea Cheang has spent her career creating works that elegantly grapple with the complexities of activism, racial and sexual politics, critical media theory, and erotic exploration. Her first feature, made in collaboration with Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Vernon Reid, and Pedro Pietri, among many other cultural icons, shimmers with queer grace amidst a decaying New York of the future. Inspired by Staten Island’s notorious sprawling landfill and the Taiwanese government's nuclear pollution of Orchid Island, Cheang’s work offers us the ecofeminist wisdom we need to survive the grim realities of these times with our hearts and communities intact.

    The screening will start at 18:00 with doors open (and margaritas shaking) from 17:00.

    Let’s not let Pamela slip away!

  3. Carnage for Christmas

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Carnage for Christmas

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Celebrate a queer bloody Christmas with the hilarious, camp horror Carnage for Christmas from Australian trans filmmaker Alice Maio Mackey. When a true crime podcaster returns to her hometown for the first time since transitioning, she discovers that a mysterious urban legend has gone on a killing spree. With her queer group she sets out to investigate.
    Maio Mackey puts her own spin on the long tradition of holiday slashers with the likes of Black Christmas and Silent Night. Only 20 years old when she made this film with a non-existent budget but a wonderfully enthusiastic group of friends, including Vera Drew (director of The People's Joker).

  4. Equation to an Unknown

    By AMFM x PFFA @ Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Equation to an Unknown

    By AMFM x PFFA @ Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    This restored 16mm print, commissioned by filmmaker Yann Gonzalez in 2016 from the original negative, screens now for the first time in Amsterdam, on loan from the CinÊmathèque française and Gonzalez himself, who will introduce the film in person. Co-programmed with the Porn Film Festival Amsterdam.

    Équation à un Inconnu is at once a defining moment and an obscure episode of gay erotic cinema. Its director, Francis Savel – an artist who worked largely within the margins of 1970s and 80s French New Wave and adult film production – sets his images to a pulsing synth score. In the film, we follow a young motorcyclist through a series of erotic encounters that circle around desire, memory, and the search for another, the “unknown” of the title. The year that followed would bring the first recorded cases of AIDS, giving Savel’s elegy of bodies an unintended prophetic weight.

  5. Kissable Screens: The Garden Cadences

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Kissable Screens: The Garden Cadences

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Jone is ready to fly. She finds herself at the beginning of something new, but before she moves on, there needs to be a closure. Jone is one of Mollies, the queer-feminist collective that had been living for a decade at a trailer park next to Ostkreuz, Berlin. The Garden Cadences traces their last summer before being evicted.

    Director’s note: “In 2021, I made traces of a moment that would otherwise be inevitably lost and filmed Mollies before their imminent eviction. Their long-standing home was torn down the following spring. An aquarium is to be built in its place. For Mollies, living together was not just about seeking a different way of living, but also about the need to form a community that would embrace and empower. The difficulty of trying to find a new place spacious enough to accommodate all nine members crashed with personal frictions between them and they did not survive as a collective. Aalo comes from Finland, Jone from Lithuania, Aoife was born in Dubai. Neo uses no pronouns, several use they/them, several are transitioning. Mollies was constantly shifting in shape and size, their friends and lovers finding a temporary refuge at the trailer park. This is a space of fluidity in more ways than one. It is a film about togetherness, made together, offering a glimpse of queer everyday life led outside the patriarchal-capitalist complex, while also being a record of the time spent together, doing nothing, like beasts. Ultimately, I felt the need to inscribe myself into the film. The post-pandemic years marked the moment when I questioned my own practice of love and grappled with my own gender. The Garden Cadences is also a dialogue with oneself.”

  6. Unbound (preceded by Skate+) + Q&A with directors

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    Unbound (preceded by Skate+) + Q&A with directors

    Filmhuis Cavia, Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam

    A group of abuse survivors from the ballet world walk out of toxic companies & start a radical, inclusive, supportive new company of their own. Led by a gender fluid ballet insurgent, they fight to reclaim the stage. To succeed, they must start from nothing, face past traumas, fight for justice, & find belief to dance again with defiance and joy.