The filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim remembers his humble origins from the unglamorous district of Frankfurt Praunheim.

Documentary short by Rosa von Praunheim.

In the background, Rosa von Praunheim sings a love song in a foreign language. The sound engineer counts as the camera moves over Rosa’s black plastic jacket. Carla Aulaulu sings while a young girl (also Carla) collapses from exhaustion while climbing stairs with a shopping bag. An erotic relationship is suggested as the camera focuses on the bag swinging between the maid’s thighs. The maid struggles to make tea for the Klostermann family, who sit stiffly in evening gowns with plastic egg cups on their heads and paper in their noses. One daughter stabs the maid. The family watches the maid’s excessive dancing, amused and embarrassed. Carla collapses repeatedly, with a twitch being the last.

Lady Macbeth, driven by ambition, urges her husband, Macbeth, to murder King Duncan. Macbeth becomes king but descends into madness. A Scottish nobleman, in a duel, ultimately kills Macbeth. The film, set 900 years later in Berlin, depicts this act with a blurred sequence.

Rosa von Praunheim is an icon in the scene: gay activist, loving provocateur and a very special filmmaker from Berlin for decades. His curiosity for people and their fates runs through his extensive film work. For his 70th birthday he has now made 70 new short films. In the first part of the big project, he confronts Thilo Sarrazin with the mayor of Neukölln, Heinz Buschkowsky, and the Turkish lawyer and women's rights activist Seyran Ates; shows a homosexual hustler in Bucharest; gossip reporter Andreas Kurtz, who knows everything about Berlin's celebrities; Rosa's neighbors who live with her dependent brother; Esther Bauer, who survived Auschwitz, and the Berlin comedian Ades Zabel. High on the roofs of Berlin, the gay chimney sweep Alain Rappsilber tells him about his fetish leather meeting Folsom.

Rosa von Praunheim has made 150 films and repeatedly provoked the middle-class to homophobic majority society. But he doesn't spare his own community either by accusing many gays of being conformist soft-spoken people; and by outing some prominent homosexuals against their will, he has made many enemies. For the younger generation of LGBTIQ activists, Rosa von Praunheim is still known as a figure from the early phase of the queer movement, but as a white cis man he hardly gets a hearing there. However, Rosa does not want to argue and theorize, but above all to live out his creativity. Sometimes narcissistic, sometimes angry and combative, sometimes anxious - and always with his own style. Companions such as the comic book creator Ralf König, the producer Regina Ziegler and the New York publicist Brandon Judell pay tribute to the artist and activist Rosa von Praunheim, who calls himself a “lucky child” because he was mostly able to do what he felt like doing.

Footage from rare guerilla recordings of Q&As of IT IS NOT THE HOMOSEXUAL WHO IS PERVERSE, BUT THE SOCIETY IN WHICH HE LIVES following the film’s debut as part of MoMA’s Cineprobe program, and another downtown theater. Shoddily assembled from segments of handheld 16mm footage and roughly synchronized with a reel-to-reel audio recording, the footage features the audience haranguing Praunheim about the possible effects of the film on the perception of the queer liberation movement, both in New York (just a year or so after Stonewall) and internationally. Although the film’s reception may strike us as trite today, it’s a vital document of the trends in activism of the era, as well as MoMA’s role in fostering debate. – Museum of Modern Art