Lionel Soukaz

“Ixe (written X and pronounced EEKS – as it is pronounced in French –, like a scream, a wound) is an imploded, crucified film. Made to be projected on four screens at once, X is drawn and quartered. At the four points of the compass, at the four ends of the cross, War, Sex, Religion and Drugs, the double exposures, the colliding glimpses the eye barely recognizes, the skilful repetitions of themes, remind us that Sex is also the war of bodies, and the pope, the Drug of the people. And the story of this young man, shooting up in order to experience all the horror of the world in front of his TV set, reminds us that the heroin orgy is indeed the subjective locus of the monsters of the modern unconscious.” - Guy Hocquenghem

Reel 5 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

The “Journal Annales” consists of almost 2.000 hours of video footage collected by filmmaker Lionel Soukaz since 1991. For “Carottage”, the idea was to take a random sample from this vast volume, like a geological core sample. The result is a condensed history of political struggles and radical cultural experimentation spanning two decades.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Othello Vilgard, Xavier Baert and Lionel Soukaz filmed a performance by Tom from Beijing: one strips himself naked while the others veil and reveal the film.

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Portrait of pioneering LGBT filmmaker Lionel Soukaz, who passed away in February 2025. His work lies at the crossroads of several film traditions that rarely intersect: experimental, activist, pornographic, and diary film. Based on both public and private interviews with Lionel Soukaz.

Situated in the vein of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoievski and Benjamin and of free jazz and punk, this film bears witness to the iniquitous policies that shape our era, the “infernal” nature of certain political lives or black bodies (those of immigrants, emigrants, workers, the unemployed, students...). It operates, as a minority film, in a critical stasis of mythical and mainstream realities, and deals with the issue of revolt and insurrection: excesses, disidentification, unclear reconfiguration... We are presented, through a dialectical reversal, "non-places" that cannot be assimilated, utopias, corps-impossibles

Lionel Soukaz opens a wooden panel to discover the sky and comes across Italian workers singing. He longs for them and, when they leave in the evening, finds himself alone, watching television. This video mirror sends him back to his own time: Nixon, Giscard. So he dances like a cry for help: "Love me!”. The cross-dressing scenes are like a coming out, revealing the feminine side of the filmmaker at just twenty years of age.

Portrait of French filmmaker Lionel Soukaz shot in Paris (France) on January 13, 1979 at 5:00 PM.

Daily spleen, drunkenness among friends, conversations and the passage of time: the video diaries composed by Lionel Soukaz chronicle the early 1990s, the comet tail of those never-ending winter years and the nightmare of the AIDS years. But edited thirty years later with Stéphane Gérard, they are also a tribute to Hervé Couergou, the beloved partner at the center of all the filmed scenes. Slowly, in conversations between couples and friends, the dandy spirit and intimate confession overlap. What emerges is a portrait of a way of dealing with the times and their pain, which, beneath the act of commemoration, seeks to inscribe a living presence.

Founded in the second half of the 1990s, the experimental film association L'Etna witnessed the transition from film to digital cinema. Its premises, located in the heart of Paris, were unable to withstand gentrification.

“Ixe (written X and pronounced EEKS – as it is pronounced in French –, like a scream, a wound) is an imploded, crucified film. Made to be projected on four screens at once, X is drawn and quartered. At the four points of the compass, at the four ends of the cross, War, Sex, Religion and Drugs, the double exposures, the colliding glimpses the eye barely recognizes, the skilful repetitions of themes, remind us that Sex is also the war of bodies, and the pope, the Drug of the people. And the story of this young man, shooting up in order to experience all the horror of the world in front of his TV set, reminds us that the heroin orgy is indeed the subjective locus of the monsters of the modern unconscious.” - Guy Hocquenghem

“Ixe (written X and pronounced EEKS – as it is pronounced in French –, like a scream, a wound) is an imploded, crucified film. Made to be projected on four screens at once, X is drawn and quartered. At the four points of the compass, at the four ends of the cross, War, Sex, Religion and Drugs, the double exposures, the colliding glimpses the eye barely recognizes, the skilful repetitions of themes, remind us that Sex is also the war of bodies, and the pope, the Drug of the people. And the story of this young man, shooting up in order to experience all the horror of the world in front of his TV set, reminds us that the heroin orgy is indeed the subjective locus of the monsters of the modern unconscious.” - Guy Hocquenghem

“Ixe (written X and pronounced EEKS – as it is pronounced in French –, like a scream, a wound) is an imploded, crucified film. Made to be projected on four screens at once, X is drawn and quartered. At the four points of the compass, at the four ends of the cross, War, Sex, Religion and Drugs, the double exposures, the colliding glimpses the eye barely recognizes, the skilful repetitions of themes, remind us that Sex is also the war of bodies, and the pope, the Drug of the people. And the story of this young man, shooting up in order to experience all the horror of the world in front of his TV set, reminds us that the heroin orgy is indeed the subjective locus of the monsters of the modern unconscious.” - Guy Hocquenghem

Lionel Soukaz followed Tom de Pékin in Paris, filming a succession of quick portraits of the graphic designer's entourage in a playful rhythm. music : The Brain, Kerozen voices : Tom de Pékin, Katharina

The “Journal Annales” consists of almost 2.000 hours of video footage collected by filmmaker Lionel Soukaz since 1991. For “Carottage”, the idea was to take a random sample from this vast volume, like a geological core sample. The result is a condensed history of political struggles and radical cultural experimentation spanning two decades.

A contemporary scenario, in which American journalist Doug Ireland visits Europe and meets an oppressed young Arab man, is played against the celebrated story of Emperor Hadrian’s relationship with his favourite Antinous.

A contemporary scenario, in which American journalist Doug Ireland visits Europe and meets an oppressed young Arab man, is played against the celebrated story of Emperor Hadrian’s relationship with his favourite Antinous.

Othello Vilgard, Xavier Baert and Lionel Soukaz filmed a performance by Tom from Beijing: one strips himself naked while the others veil and reveal the film.

Othello Vilgard, Xavier Baert and Lionel Soukaz filmed a performance by Tom from Beijing: one strips himself naked while the others veil and reveal the film.

A film by Lionel Soukaz

Film restored by Yves-Marie Mahé from several recordings made during past screenings, notably in the basement of the L’Etna laboratory. A car journey, then the bedroom. The naked body in bed, sleeping or smiling at the camera, splits in two and overlaps. Accompanied by Christophe’s melancholic pop songs, a raw tenderness emerges.

A compilation of scenes that were censored and cut from Lionel Soukaz's 1979 film "Race d'Ep!"

"Race d’Ep!" (which literally translates to "Breed of Faggots") was made by the “father of queer theory,” Guy Hocquenghem, in collaboration with radical queer filmmaker and provocateur Lionel Soukaz. The film traces the history of modern homosexuality through the twentieth century, from early sexology and the nudes of Baron von Gloeden to gay liberation and cruising on the streets of Paris. Influenced by the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault on the history of sexuality and reflecting the revolutionary queer activism of its day, "Race d’Ep!" is a shockingly frank, sex-filled experimental documentary about gay culture emerging from the shadows.

"Race d’Ep!" (which literally translates to "Breed of Faggots") was made by the “father of queer theory,” Guy Hocquenghem, in collaboration with radical queer filmmaker and provocateur Lionel Soukaz. The film traces the history of modern homosexuality through the twentieth century, from early sexology and the nudes of Baron von Gloeden to gay liberation and cruising on the streets of Paris. Influenced by the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault on the history of sexuality and reflecting the revolutionary queer activism of its day, "Race d’Ep!" is a shockingly frank, sex-filled experimental documentary about gay culture emerging from the shadows.

"Race d’Ep!" (which literally translates to "Breed of Faggots") was made by the “father of queer theory,” Guy Hocquenghem, in collaboration with radical queer filmmaker and provocateur Lionel Soukaz. The film traces the history of modern homosexuality through the twentieth century, from early sexology and the nudes of Baron von Gloeden to gay liberation and cruising on the streets of Paris. Influenced by the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault on the history of sexuality and reflecting the revolutionary queer activism of its day, "Race d’Ep!" is a shockingly frank, sex-filled experimental documentary about gay culture emerging from the shadows.

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You can, in fact, trace my life through my films. The first one was called Paris Chausey -- a love story about an island. I was desperate to find a place where I could breathe, and at the time I was completely under Godard’s influence -- I needed to break free from it. And to escape an influence, it’s important to take it as far as your admiration goes: it’s wonderful to admire a writer or a filmmaker, to watch all their films, to fall asleep with their book, but in the end, it suffocates you. My first film was my way of breaking out of the Nouvelle Vague that had shaped my childhood, when I spent all my nights and days at the Cinémathèque.

A fantasia on the inner lives of gay teenagers in '70s France.

A fantasia on the inner lives of gay teenagers in '70s France.

A fantasia on the inner lives of gay teenagers in '70s France.

A trip to Andalusia, filmed from the window of a bus, hand on his companion’s bulge.

In 1991, Lionel Soukaz initiated his Journal annales, filming his "community of fags, poor people, and drug addicts" confronted with the AIDS epidemic, in 2,000 hours where public events intersect with the intimacy of his daily life. Faced with the impossibility of making a montage that would reflect the richness of this approach, Stéphane Gérard and Lionel Soukaz, for this project, focus on associations, mobilizations, meetings: the collective forms of commitment among the diversity of the fronts of struggle.

"I filmed my boyfriend at the time and tried to strip him, but in fact it's a film about ecology." -Soukaz Soukaz's first film, though lost for many years until it was finally recovered.

An "action" by Michel Journiac, performed at the book fair on March the 16th, 1993, where he exhibited 150 poems marked with his own blood. Michel Journiac had a blood sample taken in public and then spread the blood on three plexiglass plaques on which Fernando Pessoa's words were written : "Outside all this, there is Christ, who knew nothing about finance - and, it seems, didn't have a library". The works were then attached to a background and exhibited before the public.