On National Coming Out Day (October 11, 2022) and as part of LGBT History Month, Cinema Thinks The World is delighted to present a free screening of Heiner Carow’s landmark film, Coming Out, the first – and last – East German feature film to deal openly with homosexuality. It was the last because Coming Out was also released in cinemas on the day (November 9, 1989) that the Berlin Wall came down, an event that overshadowed the film’s initial release – even as the film has become a cult classic. The screening also coincides with the publication of Prof. Kyle Frackman’s landmark study of the film, published by Boydell & Brewster in 2022 – and Prof. Frackman will lead a discussion about the film after the screening.
The screening takes place at UBC Robson Square at 6pm and is open to everyone. This is the second of five free screenings that will be held at Robson Square as part of the Cinema Thinks the World series.
About the film
Philipp, a closeted teacher, is dating a female colleague to keep up appearances. One night, however, he stumbles into a gay bar and falls for a man. Transformed by this love, he is no longer afraid to face up to who he is. Coming Out was the first and last film to deal openly with homosexuality in the former East Germany, with its release having coincided exactly with the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989).
About the speaker
Kyle Frackman is an Associate Professor of German and Nordic Studies in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His research and teaching interests include 19th- to 21st-century German and Nordic media studies, queer studies (including history of gender and sexuality), media, book, and print history, and the history and culture of the former East Germany. He is the author of Coming Out (Camden House, 2022) and An Other Kind of Home: Gender-Sexual Abjection, Subjectivity, and the Uncanny in Literature and Film (Peter Lang, 2015), as well as the editor of Gender and Sexuality in East German Film: Intimacy and Alienation (with Faye Stewart, Camden House, 2018), Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception (with Larson Powell, Camden House, 2015), and From Weimar to Christiania: German and Scandinavian Studies in Context (with Florence Feiereisen, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).
“Cinema Thinks the World” is sponsored by the Public Humanities Hub at the University of British Columbia. Through a series of public screenings, panel talks, and discussions, it aims to explore the ways in which global cinema represents and helps us to think about the world.
Featured images: (c) DEFA-Stiftung Wolfgang Fritsche and Camden House / Boydell & Brewer
