Avant-garde filmmaker, major figure in experimental cinema and pioneer of the gay rights movement, Lionel Soukaz passed away in Marseille on 4 February 2025. To honour his work and commitment, several venues in Marseille – La Cômerie, the Mucem, Videodrome 2 and the Gyptis – are dedicating a series of screenings to him between late November and December. FIDMarseille is joining in this tribute by presenting three of his films, two of which, reflecting the homosexual condition before the AIDS epidemic, were censored upon their release. The screening will be presented by Olivier Pierre, programmer at FID.
RACE D’EP ! ROYAL OPÉRA
Lionel Soukaz
France, 1979, 26’
Race d’Ep! offers a journey through the century in four stages. Four stories based on archetypes of the gay unconscious. ‘1900: Le Temps de la pose’ (1900: The Time of the Pose) features a former model recalling memories of a wealthy German baron photographing young naked men. ‘1930, Berlin: The Roaring Twenties’ to extermination, the story of the lesbian secretary of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the Institute for Sexology. The next stage, ‘1960, Sweet Sixteen in the Sixties’, plunges us into a hippie Eden for ‘flower boys’. Finally, in ‘Royal Opera’, we follow the wanderings of two men on the banks of the Seine for a night of cruising in 1970s Paris.
IXE
Lionel Soukaz
France, 1980, 48’
Ixe (…) is an imploded, crucified film. Designed to be projected on four screens simultaneously, X is a tearing apart: at the four cardinal points, at the four ends of the cross, war, sex, religion and drugs. The interplay of superimpositions, flashes barely registered by the eye, like skilful repetitions of themes, reminds us that sex is also war between bodies and the Pope, the drug of the people. And, through the story of this young man who injects himself to experience all the horror of the world in front of his television, we see that the injection is indeed the subjective geometric locus of the monsters of the modern unconscious.
(Guy Hocquenghem, CrucifiX, 1980)
CAROTTAGE
Lionel Soukaz, Powers, Stéphane Gérard
France, 2013, 47’
Lionel Soukaz returns to delve into his vast Journal Annales as if it were geological terrain, extracting a condensed history of two decades of political and cultural struggles and reinforcing the importance of this constantly evolving archival project.