In Person:
Jan Soldat. Männer(t)räume
January 15 and 16, 2025
Jan Soldat is one of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers working today. His films have been shown in renowned festivals like Cannes, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, and the Berlinale as well as short, porno, and niche festivals. Broadly categorized, his works can be divided into two groups:
1. Date films, special documentary forms that create a catalog of sexual deviance, a lexicon of the perverse and non-normative. 2. Meticulously researched found footage films focusing on dying/death scenes, featuring Udo Kier and Christopher Lee, or, most recently, women's deaths in the series Ein Fall für zwei.
Only rarely shooting handheld, Soldat's formal signature is the static shot. He is responsible for direction, production, camera, editing, and sound, and is nearly alone on location. His series Erste Dates Kurzfilme, which he began in 2010 and now encompasses over 120 films, requires this production process. Who wants to let themselves be filmed? This is the call he posts on homo- and heterosexual platforms, which has so far been answered primarily by older bi- and homosexual men. Sexually explicit, mostly naked, they share their experiences, sexual routines, preferences, and fetishes. In a documentary sense, Soldat’s date films are similar to the Kinsey Report, which tried to track human sexual behavior in the 1940s and 1950s.
As mediated displays, porn often plays a role in Soldat's films, however, his works are located much more at the intersection to documentary, giving more attention to how sex is talked about and framed. Wanting to see and show, in short being curious, are Soldat's most important parameters: Cinema as a space for experience. (Dietmar Schwärzler / Translation: Ted Fendt)
In collaboration with sixpackfilm
For viewers 18 and up
Jan Soldat is one of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers working today. His films have been shown in renowned festivals like Cannes, Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, and the Berlinale as well as short, porno, and niche festivals. Broadly categorized, his works can be divided into two groups:
1. Date films, special documentary forms that create a catalog of sexual deviance, a lexicon of the perverse and non-normative. 2. Meticulously researched found footage films focusing on dying/death scenes, featuring Udo Kier and Christopher Lee, or, most recently, women's deaths in the series Ein Fall für zwei.
Only rarely shooting handheld, Soldat's formal signature is the static shot. He is responsible for direction, production, camera, editing, and sound, and is nearly alone on location. His series Erste Dates Kurzfilme, which he began in 2010 and now encompasses over 120 films, requires this production process. Who wants to let themselves be filmed? This is the call he posts on homo- and heterosexual platforms, which has so far been answered primarily by older bi- and homosexual men. Sexually explicit, mostly naked, they share their experiences, sexual routines, preferences, and fetishes. In a documentary sense, Soldat’s date films are similar to the Kinsey Report, which tried to track human sexual behavior in the 1940s and 1950s.
As mediated displays, porn often plays a role in Soldat's films, however, his works are located much more at the intersection to documentary, giving more attention to how sex is talked about and framed. Wanting to see and show, in short being curious, are Soldat's most important parameters: Cinema as a space for experience. (Dietmar Schwärzler / Translation: Ted Fendt)
In collaboration with sixpackfilm
For viewers 18 and up
For each series, films are listed in screening order.
