Beyond Terror?

Mango
Joan Iyiola, UK, France 2025, 11 min. English

Tokum Ama Yerim (I'm Full But I'll Eat Anyway)
Bilge Olcay Yılmaz, Turkey 2025, 5 min. Turkish with English subtitles

Allen Anders - Live at the Comedy Castle, Circa 1987
Lee Moss, USA 2018, 7 min. English

BERTA
Lucía Forner Segarra, Spain 2024, 17 min. Spanishwith English subtitles

Wanna Die Wanna Kill
Jeong Jaehee, South Korea 2024, 22 min. Korean with English subtitles

Striya
Paige Campbell, USA 2025, 8 min. Yiddish with English subtitles

Hotel Acropole
Sarah Lasry, France 2025, 20 min. French with English subtitles

Confession
Mai Nakanishi, Japan 2025, 15 min. Japanese with English subtitles

Curated by Lost Film and Final Girls Berlin Film Festival

Introduced by Prof. Dr. María do Mar Castro Varela. Followed by a talk with Farah Bouamar, Nabila Bushra, Eli Lewy, Sara Neidorf and Dr. Véronique Sina (in German and English). 

Horror film is fictional affective cinema: panic, disgust, and revulsion are just as central here as the fear of the unknown and the uncanny. Both fascinating and disturbing, the horror genre has developed, over the course of film history, a rich set of narrative and visual staging strategies to create an intense physical and emotional experience for the audience. At the same time, the fear stoked in horror films of the foreign, the non-human, and the intangible is often interwoven with forms of sexist, racist, and antisemitic discrimination. But what lies beyond the terror in horror film? To what extent can the horror genre—traditionally dominated by a white, patriarchal, heteronormative discourse—also serve as a site of transgression, subversion, and revision of (contemporary) socio-political discourses?

These short horror films, which screened in previous editions of Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, renegotiate the conventions of horror from an intersectional perspective and engage with themes such as hunger, guilt, and bodily transformation.

The event is part of the DFG-funded research project “Queering Jewishness – Jewish Queerness. Discursive Representations of Gender and 'Jewish Difference” in (Audio-)Visual Media"  at the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt.

Prof. Dr. María do Mar Castro Varela is a professor of pedagogy and social work at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin, a psychologist and educator with a PhD in political science, founder of bildungsLab* and chair of the Berlin Institute for Contrapuntal Social Analysis.

Farah Bouamar is a cultural studies scholar, author and filmmaker with a focus on horror, researches gender and religion and is co-founder of the non-profit company Lost Film and a member of bildungsLab*.

Nabila Bushra is an educator, social scientist and filmmaker who researches gender, ecology and economy, teaches at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin and is co-founder of the non-profit company Lost Film and a member of bildungsLab*.

Eli Lewy is the co-director and co-founder of the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival. She works as a translator, editor and has a film podcast called Somebody's Watching which features discussions with film scholars about dark & unusual subject matters and interviews with filmmakers and cinephiles.

Sara Neidorf is co-director and co-founder of Final Girls Berlin Film Festival and a freelance drummer who works in genre-expansive bands and interdisciplinary contexts, including performing live scores for experimental, surrealist, and horror films. 

Dr. Véronique Sina is a film and media studies scholar at Goethe University Frankfurt, and the the Principal Investigator of the DFG funded project "Queering Jewishness – Jewish Queerness. Discursive Constructions of Gender and ‘Jewish Difference’ in (Audio-)Visual Media". 

Final Girls Berlin Film Festival showcases horror cinema that’s directed, written, or produced by women and non-binary filmmakers. We are committed to creating space for female voices and visions, whether monstrous, heroic or some messy combination of the two, in the horror genre. 

Lost Film is a non-profit company working at the intersection of film, society and politics, producing socially critical horror films and combining educational work and curatorial practice, and through formats such as screenings, workshops and readings engaging with social issues and creating spaces for critical reflection and creative exchange.