Hanspeter Ammann

Two lonely customers meet in an empty Shanghai bar late at night. They seem attracted to one another yet unable to really connect for long.

On a Sunday an older actress (Isabel Ruth) decides to use her mobile phone to take photos of a sleeping young actor (Joaozinho Costa)

Ruben can’t decide. Women or men.

An experimental film that became a poetic exploration of the mechanisms of attraction and desire. The material was shot 40 years ago when the director met a man once a week and recorded these encounters. After the City of Geneva acquired various works for their 'Collection d'art contemporain' in 2021, he began to re-edit this vintage footage by extracting many still images and merging them into new clips.

The title is ironic in that the majority of the scenes are modest domestic portraits (a suburban dinner party, for instance, or a family enjoying a lazy afternoon) where latent emotional tensions only just break the surface - to be intuited rather than grasped directly. It is the recording apparatus that seems to capture these intangible currents and bring them under public scrutiny.Yet the status of what we are seeing remains indefinite, since the camera can also function as a catalyst. Do we really glimpse the inner 'truth 'of these individuals - or is it merely discomfort at the fact of being observed? A work of structured ambiguity that tests the camera 's capacity for violence.

In this series of short films, the phrase "Gay Agenda" is reclaimed from the religious right and transformed into a celebration of gay culture. Sit back and enjoy "Shanghai Night", "My Own Life", and "A Proper Man".

Two lonely customers meet in an empty Shanghai bar late at night. They seem attracted to one another yet unable to really connect for long.

Two lonely customers meet in an empty Shanghai bar late at night. They seem attracted to one another yet unable to really connect for long.

Two lonely customers meet in an empty Shanghai bar late at night. They seem attracted to one another yet unable to really connect for long.

On a Sunday an older actress (Isabel Ruth) decides to use her mobile phone to take photos of a sleeping young actor (Joaozinho Costa)

On a Sunday an older actress (Isabel Ruth) decides to use her mobile phone to take photos of a sleeping young actor (Joaozinho Costa)

On a Sunday an older actress (Isabel Ruth) decides to use her mobile phone to take photos of a sleeping young actor (Joaozinho Costa)

Ruben can’t decide. Women or men.

An experimental film that became a poetic exploration of the mechanisms of attraction and desire. The material was shot 40 years ago when the director met a man once a week and recorded these encounters. After the City of Geneva acquired various works for their 'Collection d'art contemporain' in 2021, he began to re-edit this vintage footage by extracting many still images and merging them into new clips.

The title is ironic in that the majority of the scenes are modest domestic portraits (a suburban dinner party, for instance, or a family enjoying a lazy afternoon) where latent emotional tensions only just break the surface - to be intuited rather than grasped directly. It is the recording apparatus that seems to capture these intangible currents and bring them under public scrutiny.Yet the status of what we are seeing remains indefinite, since the camera can also function as a catalyst. Do we really glimpse the inner 'truth 'of these individuals - or is it merely discomfort at the fact of being observed? A work of structured ambiguity that tests the camera 's capacity for violence.

In this series of short films, the phrase "Gay Agenda" is reclaimed from the religious right and transformed into a celebration of gay culture. Sit back and enjoy "Shanghai Night", "My Own Life", and "A Proper Man".