Boston’s Wicked Queer Film Festival celebrates 100 Years of QUEER GERMAN CINEMA

 

It seems almost impossible to believe to us ‘youngsters’ at Queerguru that German filmmakers have been making queer cinema for over a century now.  Since the Weimer Republic, German cinema has played a leading role in the innovation of gay and lesbian cinema, with the tantalizing sexual illegibility and gender instability of German films of the 1920s anticipating the queer sensibilities of the 1990s.   

Our friends at WICKED QUEER, Boston’s LGBTQ Film Festival have collaborated with Goethe-Institut Boston to present a mini-fest to celebrate this important canon of queer cinema.  It is a rare opportunity to see some of the most important queer cinema from the first half of the 20th century alongside groundbreaking work from the 1970s through today. 

It all kicks off with Richard Oswald’s seminal work, DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS, a revolutionary 1919 silent melodrama that boldly challenged the oppressive laws of Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality during the Weimar Republic era. Throughout the ensuing century, German cinema has continued to blaze trails, offering a diverse array of films exploring the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals and communities

 

 

 

Mädchen in Uniform (“Girls in Uniform”) is a 1931 German romantic drama film that became an international cult classic due to the film’s overt and openly lesbian themes. It was based on the play Gestern und heute (Yesterday and Today) by Christa Winsloe and directed by Leontine Sagan with artistic direction from Carl Froelich, who also funded the film. On October 1, 1931, a ban was placed on Mädchen in Uniform at the first inspection committee showing which forbade young people from viewing…… it was almost banned in the U.S., but Eleanor Roosevelt spoke highly of the film

 

 

 

Victor and Victoria (German: Viktor und Viktoria) is a 1933 German musical comedy film written and directed by Reinhold Schünzel, starring Renate Müller as a woman pretending to be a female impersonator.  It proved such a popular story it was adapted three times, first a French-language version of the film titled George and Georgette, and then a English version titled First a Girl, directed by Victor Saville and starring Jessie Matthews and Sonnie Hale, and then finally in 1982  Blake Edwards directed his wife Julie Andrews for MGM  in his film version and as a stage musical too

 

 

 

It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (German: Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt) is a 1971 West German avant-garde film directed by wicked   The film was an emancipatory call for homosexuals to organize and fight for their freedom and triggered the modern gay rights movement in West Germany and Switzerland and also found great resonance internationally. The film became a media scandal because conservative homosexuals and heterosexuals alike rejected the demands for equality in all areas of life and the call for public solidarity

 

https://queerguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SaveClip.App_AQOcNkei8mVdafx6TfKI_pFwsp9RVlA6zNhbdUqEpjjTVksZvrQ9DrAqPXkXq8CW-5TxxU8MoEq-bXGQerjt1iGU404ZPVC5Xji8088-1.mp4

For full details and dates etc https://www.queer.film/wickedqueer/wq-newsletters/100-years-of-queer-german-cinema