With Barbara Forever, director Brydie O’Connor takes on the ambitious task of telling the story of pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer. In the early 1970s, at 27, Hammer began filming her own life. Her body, lovers, desires, anger and joy became the raw material of her cinema. At a time when lesbian stories remained largely invisible, she created a radiant body of work where the intimate became a space for experimentation and self-affirmation. Drawing on decades of films, archives and recordings, Barbara Forever lets Hammer tell her own story. Her voice guides the images she created, while her longtime partner Florrie Burke reflects on their life together and the enduring legacy of her work.

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Self-portrait of Barbara Hammer, a pioneer of experimental lesbian cinema who continually questioned how a life can be told, preserved and passed on. In Tender Fictions, Hammer creates an autobiography in her own image: free and elusive. Super 8 footage, personal archives, testimonies, appropriated excerpts and imagined fragments come together in a collage where she investigates her own life as much as she reinvents it. With constant humour and exhilarating formal inventiveness, she blurs the boundaries between archive, memory and fiction.

Screening introduced in French by ladestructiondesespacesvides.

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