2024: 29 June - 14 July

Pride Day: Sat 13 July

UK Premiere: Laws of Love (Gesetze der Liebe) + Panel Discussion

Fri 22 July

Watershed

£8.50/£6.50/£5.00

Rating: 18 CTBA

Ended

Restored & Rediscovered

Painstakingly restored by the Munich Film MuseumLaws Of Love (Gesetze der Liebe) is structured as a series of lectures from pioneering scientist and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (SHC), which deployed scientific theories of human sexuality to advocate for the recognition of LGBTQ+ people, and campaigned against their legal persecution.

Gesetze der Liebe grew out of Hirschfeld’s first foray into film – the path-breaking gay rights fiction feature Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern, 1919), which Hirschfeld co-wrote and which he appears as himself, delivering some of the lecture material later transferred into Laws of Love.

Through the lectures, Hirschfeld explores the prevalence of non-heteronormative behaviour in the natural world, to expose the injustice of Paragraph 175 – Germany’s anti-sodomy penal code at the time. The film is considered to be an influential example of the ‘enlightenment film’ trend that was popular throughout Weimar-era Germany.

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