Reassembling the Discards of Queer History

Interview with Sarnt Utamachote

Queer history has been built on the foundations of community, on the eagerness to survive outside of the heteronormative norm and the gender binary. Curators achieve an essential labour of memory by keeping a collective remembrance alive and safe from censorship and the threatening passage of time. While researching XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin’s stimulating perspective on queer cinema, I came across Sarnt’s works and their attentiveness to the intersection between politics and art. Sarnt is a Southeast Asian nonbinary filmmaker and curator based in Berlin, whose work mainly focuses on postcolonialism and migration, Southeast Asian diaspora, queerness, and transnationalism. They are part of un.thai.tled, an artist collective from the Thai-German diaspora, and Cruising Curators, a curator collective formed out of the 11th Berlin Biennale’s Young Curators Workshop in 2020. Lastly, they work as a curator for Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin, and Sinema Transtopia.

Prior to our conversation, I was lucky to receive a selection of short film screeners in order to trace a general idea around the many themes, countries and inquiries that the festival is shedding light on: from the reflection of nature as a nurturing space for the queer community in Rezbotanik (by Pedro Gonçalves Ribeiro), passing through the unique depiction of the queer body as an inhabitant of the erotic through the subversion of film genres in Picumã (Sladká Meduza) or El club del sida (Milko Delgado), to the eye-opening documentary qualities of Girl-Boy (Ajay Abalaka). Through this rich viewing experience, it became clear how the constitution of their programming relied on collaborative work, divergent voices and visions, and the ambition to bring meaningful queer representations to international audiences, in-person and remotely.

Sarnt composes short film programmes as a cultural exercise to expand, rethink, and experiment with the canonical notion of queerness. As part of the XPOSED programming team, Sarnt’s vision aims to engage with the festival’s archive as well as contemporary hidden gems to make films accessible. The Deutsche Kinemathek, an institution that belongs to the German state, along with the collaboration of the Queere Kulturstiftung (Queer Cultural Foundation), started working on a Queer Cinema Archive in Berlin this year. The presentation of the project, whose contents will be mainly focused on classic German auteurs like Ulrike Ottinger, Lothar Lambert, Elfi Mikesch, and Yony Leyser, along with international works from queer history, took place in February and raised concerns about its lack of non-white and non-cisgender perspectives. Although this archive is meant to be worked on through curators and film researchers whose work aims to expand and sharpen its compilation of queer works, it is worth mentioning this historical context and the takeoff of this archive.

XPOSED is celebrating its 20th anniversary and placing its focus on intersectionality, beyond Western, cisgender and able-bodied visions of queerness, through a team of five curators from across the world: David Bakum, Merle Groneweg, Kareem Jamaal Baholzer, Pol Merchan and Sarnt themselves. “Making a festival like this one is done with a team; I am not alone. We try to make a collective direction together and be quite vocal against this idea of fake diversity,” they explain. Clearly, Sarnt envisions curation as a collaborative process that, unconsciously, delves into a fundamental political diversity from its first steps. “I question what it really means to include different perspectives, not only for the sake of ticking the box,” they state while referring to the non-competitive nature of the festival. This is how XPOSED advocates for a sense of freedom and collaboration right from its structure: “We are not putting films together to compete with each other or looking for any standard. We look for something that is relevant, something that has authenticity. It just needs to blow our minds.”

The short format is a particularly effective way to achieve a truly inclusive perspective on queerness, as it can generate and direct discourse through screening many different works. Contrast and correlation between short films allow the festival to weave together questions of colonialism, race, bodies, sex work, science fiction, or ecology beyond the Western, cisgender, young, or able-bodied perspective. “Just ask simple questions, like how many disabled queer filmmakers can make a film, and what kind of film. The answer is a short film. It requires less budget, less effort, it is collective and has less commercial value”.

The term collaboration is ever-present in queer film discussion, as seen in Girl-Boy (2025) by Ajay Alabaka, a short film that follows the lives of four masc-presenting women from Nigeria. With its low-budget documentary aesthetics, the footage blends real-life interviews with hand-drawn animated passages that illustrate the protagonists’ hardships and upbringing. Alabaka’s endeavour sheds light on these four particular queer realities and shows them to the rest of the community through the queer-festival circuit. “Many times shorts are just made for the people involved, so that’s very pure, in terms of how it can represent something,” says Sarnt, while pondering short films’ specific filmmaking process.

El club del SIDA (Milko Delgado, 2024)

Eyes to See by South African filmmaker Haneem Christian interviews Queer Khoe Elder Dr. Yvette Abrahams and, through attentive close-ups of soil and flora, discusses the spiritual connection between queerness and African cultural practices. “We need to look at the past to see the future,” says Dr. Yvette Abrahams in the film. To work and piece together the discarded remains of history is fundamental because, as Sarnt says: “It is important to look back, even beyond the term that we think of now. There are so many themes and histories that are queer. Queerness has been hidden, it has been left for us to unpack, all given to reimagining. So we are interested in films that question our past, coming from other countries and territories where transphobia and homophobia are still quite a thing. Consider the past so you can expand on what queerness means, let it be a photograph, a letter, a manuscript…”

German filmmaker Les Lón’su’s Floraison (2025) touches upon physical experiences of the body when entering and participating in an underground ballroom for the first time. Close-ups of hands vogueing, feet moving, and faces with sweat dripping convey this tactile and multisensorial idea of the audience embodying what they are seeing on screen. The notion of haptic visuality is ever-present in short films, as they encourage a spectatorial experience that relies on the senses. The heat, the frenzy, and the joy of dancing are perfectly captured in less than ten minutes of runtime, as the short film depicts the atmosphere of this pivotal place for the queer community that you may have visited in the past or are looking forward to. “It is vastly different from features, where you go on one single journey, and this is the magic of a shorts programme. There is an element of discovery for the audience,” continues Sarnt.

The XPOSED festival team let the short films speak for themselves, through specific programmes that, under titles like “Body Futures, Borders, Bodies” or “You Pay, I Desire”, touch upon gender and sexual dynamics, subverting them and reshaping what it means to film a queer body, its roles and desires. Explicit scenes can work as a rebellion against censorship while creatively subverting how queer intimacy is depicted on screen. Sarnt questions if “it is done to commodify or sell these bodies, or to really talk about their history and the way this body exists”.

Picumã (2025) by Portuguese director Sladká Meduza, for instance, redefines the portrayal of sex, subverting Western genre conventions. This short ruptures the fourth wall and positions the camera in the place of another character, in a direct and moving device that lets the film talk to the audience. Again delving into the collaborative nature of their work, Sarnt explains: “We have critical discussions of, let’s say, artistic pornography. Every year, we have this question of how many porn short films should be shown, and we struggle to understand how deep these films are, meaning critical, self-questioning, and outside of cliches. For us, it is very important to have further discussions: What is the depth of that story, what is the urgency, what is the relevance?”

In a lot of those films, nature is an ever-present space that holds the characters and comforts them with a sense of familiar strangeness, against the constrained domesticity of a conservative household. It is a space bigger than any individual, that has no gender or sexual orientation, while nurturing a flowing and free quality that speaks to the queer individual. “It has always been like this, if you look at the last twenty years of queer cinema history,” they continue. “Nature has been depicted by queer filmmakers as a space where queer people find momentary freedom, or have sexual pleasure outside of the domestic space and traditional family or gender roles.” Pedro Gonçalves Ribeiro’s Rezbotanik (2025) portrays the Botanical Garden of Lisbon as a space to heal, and turns flora and vegetation into queer guides for its protagonist Rezmorah, who is trapped in a spiral of drinking and partying, resorting to the supernatural and the magical to cleverly pave a brighter path for queer people.

“In 2026, making queer films and curating queer programmes should be more progressive than it is,” Sarnt says. “It’s extremely necessary for the short films to be related to themes that are not necessarily queer, such as decolonisation, anti genocide, and to be brave enough to mention certain countries, or any forms of political parties or spaces.” The curatorial work itself makes it clear that queerness does not exist, let alone thrive, inside a vacuum. Being introduced to Sarnt’s alluring and challenging approach to queer cinema forges a connection through a shared sentiment of art as a vital pedestal for the community. The act of curating is a conscious construction of a community interconnected through generations, nationalities, and identity. It allows works to exist in places they have never before, and materialises realities beyond the individual.

Intersectionality has to weave itself into the classical aesthetics that tackle queer film archives, film the body as a means of revolution, or portray nature as a space to inhabit, survive, and occupy. “I believe it is selfish to curate a programme just thinking about queerness on its own,” concludes Sarnt, emphasising the countless notions that pierce through the queer body. XPOSED and Sarnt question the queer canon and its themes and aesthetics, expanding on them from different and unseen perspectives, redefining what it means to make, show, and put together a thematic queer short film programme. For them, queerness is a methodology to look at the homogenic paradigm and celebrate the intersectional nature of short film curation.