Klappe

It is difficult to find a term that would describe this film by Jurgen Bruning – the founder and co-founder of the Porn Film Festival Berlin – in a coherent and concrete way. Seemingly, “Klappe” is a homo-political manifest resembling an unbalanced remix of quotes and pop-cultural references rather than a structured record of the director’s autobiography, On the other hand, however, it really is a biographical film – even if slightly wild. Just as its creator. It is a cinematic delicacy, laced with the romantic sauce of the cultural revolution that Bruning helped co-create (among others, as the producer of BruceLaBruce and Shu Lea Chang films) combining both a homo-rebellious social feature spiced with a musical score, and a decisive anti-fascist, anti-religious, and anti-totalitarian message. “Klappe” is one of the festival’s gems that shines with a rarely seen cinematic vocabulary and brings viewers closer to how very unapparent things were happening in the field of broadly understood gay identity before we all got a bit bogged down by rainbow capitalism.