City of Lost Souls presented by Little Joe

About

City of Lost Souls Rosa von Praunheim | 91’ | West Germany | 1983 |💭DE | 🔤 EN The screening will be preceded by an extended introduction by Sam Ashby, the founder, editor, designer, and publisher of Little Joe: A Book about Queers and Cinema. Sam Ashby (b. 1981) is a British artist based in London. Sam’s archival, research-led practice is concerned with uncovering marginal narratives and activating them through film, writing and publishing. From 2010–2021 he edited, designed and published Little Joe, a journal for the discussion of film around subjects of sexuality and gender within a queer historical context. His first film, The Colour of His Hair (2017) premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam and won the Best Documentary prize at London Short Film Festival 2018. His last, La Licorne (2022), was commissioned by Villa Noailles for the 90th anniversary of Île du Levant, a naturist colony in the South of France. Little Joe, a new anthology compiled by editor Sam Ashby, brings together the cult periodical’s elusive texts and proposes a new, alternative cinematic canon drawn from the fringes of taste and style. Published as a limited-edition zine from 2010 to 2021, Little Joe challenged the mainstream narrative of film history with a rebellious, queer perspective. Rather than reviewing new releases, it explored forgotten and overlooked films and celebrated a diverse spectrum of cinema – from obscure art films to porn to Hollywood classics – as worthy of critical debate. Stubbornly print-only, Little Joe was notoriously hard to find, privileging word-of-mouth distribution akin to the films it championed.