Babeth VanLoo

Rosa von Praunheim is an icon in the scene: gay activist, loving provocateur and a very special filmmaker from Berlin for decades. His curiosity for people and their fates runs through his extensive film work. For his 70th birthday he has now made 70 new short films. In the first part of the big project, he confronts Thilo Sarrazin with the mayor of Neukölln, Heinz Buschkowsky, and the Turkish lawyer and women's rights activist Seyran Ates; shows a homosexual hustler in Bucharest; gossip reporter Andreas Kurtz, who knows everything about Berlin's celebrities; Rosa's neighbors who live with her dependent brother; Esther Bauer, who survived Auschwitz, and the Berlin comedian Ades Zabel. High on the roofs of Berlin, the gay chimney sweep Alain Rappsilber tells him about his fetish leather meeting Folsom.

Through her work for the magazine Search and Destroy in San Francisco, Mondini-VanLoo met several prominent punk bands (including the Sex Pistols) whom she interviews and films. Intrigued by Holidays in the Sun, Johnny Rotten’s song about the Berlin Wall, the next time she is in Berlin she clandestinely films the wall and includes edited footage of the Sex Pistol’s last concert with Sid Vicious at Winterland in San Francisco.

The film consists of unprocessed, original 16mm material, which VanLoo shot during the Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding contest in the 1970s, and comes from an unfortunately lost art installation. Arnold Schwarzenegger, presented here as a living work of art, gives his vision on classical sculpture, body and mind, ideal beauty and more.