Les garçons sauvages
(The Wild Boys)

Film program, FR 2017, 110 min., franz. OV + dt. UT

By: Bertrand Mandico

With: Pauline Lorillard, Vimala Pons, Diane Rouxel, Anaël Snoek, Mathilde Warnier, Elina Löwensohn

The future is trans*! With “Les garçons sauvages”, French director Bertrand Mandico does not only present the queerest film of recent times, but has also caused a sensation in cinephile circles. After the acclaimed short film director’s feature film debut celebrated its premiere in Venice, at the end of the year the legendary French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma even named it the best film of 2018. In an overwhelming, magical flood of black-and-white noir and artificially colorful camp images, Mandico stages a kind of queer retelling of “The Lord of the Flies”. In the care of a sadistic captain, the five juvenile protagonists, already guilty of a cruel lust murder in the opening sequence, are taken to a strange enchanted island on which nature itself appears hypersexualized – and the binarity of masculinity and femininity itself becomes increasingly blurred.

Supporting film: Y a-t-il une vierge encore vivante? (Any Virgin Left Alive?)

FR 2015, 9 min., franz. OV + dt. UT.
(NX)

By: Bertrand Mandico

According to an English legend, Joan of Arc did not die at the stake. Her eyes were burned, she was deflowered by an English stallion. She was then condemned to wander the battlefields, like a scavenger, in search of virgins who were still alive.