Trailer
Baldiga – Unlocked Heart
Original title: Baldiga – Entsichertes Herz
Fri
15
Fri 15 Nov 6:15 PM
The Capitol
Wheelchair
Allocated Seating
Unclassified 18+
92 Mins | Germany November
AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
A teenager who came to West Berlin from Essen in 1979 determined to become an artistic force, Jürgen Baldiga eked out a living as a cook and rent boy while cultivating an arts practice that, come an HIV-positive diagnosis in 1984, exploded into a frenzied, Dionysian documentation of West Berlin’s heaving queer underbelly. Baldiga’s estate constitutes one of the biggest holdings of Berlin’s famed Schwules Museum (est. 1985, celebrating queer culture and history). Here it provides an extraordinary trove of material to document not just Baldiga’s tragically abbreviated life (aged only 34, Baldiga died with AIDS in 1993), but also the grungy queer mecca that was the Berlin(s) of the 1980s and early ‘90s. Readings from his diaries – regularly written in the self-mythologising third person – are accompanied by newly conducted interviews with friends and intimates, archival footage, re-enactments, a sprinkling of fictional elements, and hundreds of Baldiga’s indelible photographs, making for a wholly transportive trip to the Berlins of yesteryear, and a celebration of a life lived with an accelerated gusto.
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November