🎬 Kissable Screens: The Garden Cadences (Dane Komljen, 2024)

Dane Komljen | 2024 | Germany | 62’ | EN subtitles

Jone is ready to fly. She finds herself at the beginning of something new, but before she moves on, there needs to be a closure. Jone is one of Mollies, the queer-feminist collective that had been living for a decade at a trailer park next to Ostkreuz, Berlin. The Garden Cadences traces their last summer before being evicted.

Director’s note:

“In 2021, I made traces of a moment that would otherwise be inevitably lost and filmed Mollies before their imminent eviction. Their long-standing home was torn down the following spring. An aquarium is to be built in its place. For Mollies, living together was not just about seeking a different way of living, but also about the need to form a community that would embrace and empower. The difficulty of trying to find a new place spacious enough to accommodate all nine members crashed with personal frictions between them and they did not survive as a collective. Aalo comes from Finland, Jone from Lithuania, Aoife was born in Dubai. Neo uses no pronouns, several use they/them, several are transitioning. Mollies was constantly shifting in shape and size, their friends and lovers finding a temporary refuge at the trailer park. This is a space of fluidity in more ways than one. It is a film about togetherness, made together, offering a glimpse of queer everyday life led outside the patriarchal-capitalist complex, while also being a record of the time spent together, doing nothing, like beasts. Ultimately, I felt the need to inscribe myself into the film. The post-pandemic years marked the moment when I questioned my own practice of love and grappled with my own gender. The Garden Cadences is also a dialogue with oneself.”