Ester Martin Bergsmark
2021
Maggie vaknar på balkongen
Ester Martin Bergsmark, Mark Hammarberg
Beatrice Andersson
A portrait of Maggie, through Swedish everyday life. Maggie always co-ordinates high heels with a beret, and she loves gold. She lives on the 15th floor in one of Malmö’s suburbs. Her balcony is littered with reminders of her previous life. Under a golf bag, next to a racing ticket from 1999, are the remains of a pigeon that she killed when she couldn’t sleep.
Maggie in Wonderland
Pojktanten
Ester Martin Bergsmark
Ester Martin Bergsmark, Varg Holmdahl
Caught between two genders, the artist Eli Leven and Ester Martin Bergsmark touch and caress each other, while they bath together in clouds of steam. A persuasive voice-off describes the often hard and painful growing process, which led them to choose to be neither males nor females. But something else entirely. While memories of adolescences scarred by homophobia and discrimination are presented, the audience is also captivated by poetic evocations of bodies, of snowy woods, water, nature, and snails: the symbol of androgyny. This movie moves the audience profoundly. It is a hymn to sexual fluidity, which reveals the search for the true self, rendered through the use of contrasting, vivid, and often acid bright photography. Intended as a television portrait of the transgender artist Eli Leven, it is a psychedelic docu-fiction, a hybrid movie inspired by Derek Jarman's Sebastian.
She Male Snails
Instinct
Ester Martin Bergsmark, Mad Kate
Mad Kate, Adrienne Teicher
A queer metaphysical love story that weaves itself through real and imagined sexual encounters across darkrooms, forest cruising zones and highway shoulders. In these fantastical playgrounds, bodies are free to imagine themselves in a multiplicity of forms as they encounter other bodies without preconceived notions of what those other bodies desire, what they will need, and how they should be touched. While trusting the energetic attraction of bodies towards each other and learning through the encounter, INSTINCT simultaneously asks: what does it mean for a queer body to actively (un)learn what it might assume about another body's sex, gender, and desire?
Instinct
Smågodis, katter och lite våld
Ester Martin Bergsmark
Eva Johansson, Louise Löwenberg
An existential sugar shock which takes us on a fun, candy-filled roller-coaster ride between cruel violence and extreme cuteness - which prove to be disturbingly close together.
Swedish Candy, Some Violence and a Bit of Cat
