Porn Film Festival Berlin (honorable mention in the Porn Short Competition)
Instinct is a queer metaphysical love story that weaves itself through real and imagined sexual encounters across darkrooms, forest cruising zones, and highway shoulders. Immersive and deeply layered, the film presents fantastical playgrounds where bodies imagine themselves in a multiplicity of forms and long for encounters without preconceived notions of what other bodies desire, what they will need, or how they should be touched. Instead, Instinct asks: what does it mean to actively (un)learn what we might assume about another body’s sex, gender, and desire?
Ester Martin Bergsmark, Mad Kate, Adrienne Teicher, Marit Östberg
Starring
Adrienne Teicher, Buffalo Grove, Christopher, Ester Martin Bergsmark, Finn, Jared Gradinger, Liz Rosenfeld, Mad Kate, Mere, MYSTI, Nika, Ocsaj, Paulita Pappel, River Rose, Sadie Lune, Tom Ass, Walter Crasshole
In Cypher, HYENAZ uphold the hyena—a creature maligned as grotesque—as a totem of queer survival. The work unravels a love story spun through the animal’s mythos: its androgynous physiology, its scavenging, its supposed ugliness as a testament to thriving at the margins.
Graysister (Dušan Pejčić)’s video distills this ethos into a flesh-and-pixel psalm. The artists’ faces and bodies fuse into a luminous, three-breasted hybrid—part human, part apparition. Limbs and bones blur, and genders dissolve into a radiant monstrosity that defies categorization.
Through distortion and desire, Cypher weaponizes the hyena’s vilified traits—scavenging becomes resourcefulness, androgyny becomes multiplicity, ugliness becomes a radical self-acceptance. Here, love is not pristine communion but a feral pact.
In their 2014 self titled debut, also known as “Scavenge”, HYENAZ imagined themselves as transgender hyena-humanoids, scavenging on the edges of apocalypse, building bodies and identities from civilization’s detritus.
HYENAZ are one, defiled and immaculate, their androgynous flesh quivering on the thin edge between the digital and the divine. They believe that all beings and matter are intrinsically connected, that we can choose utopia over dystopia, that time is an illusion. The album is written as an infinite circle. An electro-symphony, it is composed not track by track, but as a whole, adapting sounds and samples from around the world and influences from across time.
