Is everyone on a love diet now? Love is treated in a similarly small-minded way, like the pleasure of giving gifts, which has fallen into disrepute for years.
People are just as stingy with love as they are with everything else. The only exception is self-love. It seems one can’t be generous enough when it comes to this topic. Charity and romantic love are often left to starve. Everyone goes to therapy, but hardly anyone does voluntary work.
Once a year, the Staatsoper and iHeartBerlin invite readers and music enthusiast to the beautiful Apollosaal. For one night, the opera’s opulent marble reception hall takes on a dual role: a cinema and a cocktail bar. Related to the Opera season’s musical lineup, we hand-pick a film and craft a cocktail, aiming to stir the audience’s curiosity about a particular opera or musical piece. This year’s movie and drink by Zubrowka was all about the atmosphere and decadence of the start of the 20th century. Read on to learn more about it and see some impressions from this evening.
photo: ZDF/Marcus Glahn.
Following the recent debut of the first gay German TV show All You Need comes a new show shining a light on lesbian love stories – and we’re quite excited about it! Unfortunately, these stories have been pretty underrepresented and it’s long overdue they get the space they deserve.
Directed by Leonie Krippendorff, “Loving Her” tells the story of Hannah and her dating life in Berlin and it could not be more relatable to us. After she has had a hard time finding work in Berlin during the pandemic she is about to move back to live with her parents when she bumps into an ex-girlfriend and her new partner which sets a whole trip down memory lane in motion including all the relationships and affairs she experienced in Berlin. Each episode is dedicated to another girl that was part of her love life in the city and each represents different challenges and life lessons she learned.
A new trailer for the highly anticipated queer movie Boy Meets Boy has been released before the film’s world premiere at BFI Flare: London LGBTQI+ Film Festival this month. Directed by Daniel Sánchez López, we embark on a love story that sparkles between two guys on a dance floor and turns into a one-day-adventure on the streets of Berlin.
“The contrasts in their lives and values force each one to confront their own truths. Boy Meets Boy is a feature-length mumblecore about the journey of a brief encounter: the mark left by a fleeting moment of joy.”, the official synopsis says.
Shibari Study, photo: Viktor Herak.
Berlin is known for a lot of different things: the history and the wall, Berghain and techno, döner and currywurst, just to name a few. But two elements central to the culture in the capital are sex and art. These two intriguing aspects of life in Berlin perfectly unite in Shibari, a type of Japanese bondage that focuses on the aesthetics of the bound body. Although we’re in the middle of a pandemic and sex clubs and museums are closed, Shibari is a great way to satisfy your craving for something both kinky and creative. There are a number of organizations and instructors still offering workshops and courses about the art of Shibari during the pandemic.
When it comes to dating in Berlin, things are not quite as black and white as you imagine. There are all these different new ways of life and love we have come to accept here and it only proves the liberal spirit of the city we love so much,
But where are you on the spectrum of love? For our book Like A Berliner (which by the way makes for an excellent Christmas present – order it here!) we sat together with illustrator Sophia Halamoda and came up with a smart little game of questions and answers that will solve the riddle and define what dating type you are.
The Movie Chasing Paper Birds premieres on the 17th of September and is going to trigger a nostalgic feeling in many of us. It is a film that gives a raw and beautiful insight into Berlin’s soul in the decade of the 2010s, with the focus on Friedrichshain and all the different characters that made this Kiez so special.
As a former director of music videos and image films, Mariana Jukica has made it possible to perceive Berlin’s spirit and captured every spark. She awakens memories of a lived madness, in a time before touristy hooligans took over the city.
The movie is narrated from three perspectives. Mia, Keks and Ian, who are in their late twenties to early thirties, are all on the run from reality and on the hunt for their own personal happiness.
photos: Eylül Aslan.
Berlin’s dating scene is shaped by three important factors. First of all, mostly thanks to its kinky parties, Berlin is a city commonly characterized by a spirit of sexual liberation. Secondly, while it’s a popular choice for international expatriates, some see it as an ultimate destination, and others as a temporary stop. And finally, the notion of “finding yourself” in Berlin is used equally often as a synonym for deep soul-searching and as an excuse for flaky behavior.
It’s Sunday, we got nothing much to do, we’ve been stuck at home for weeks, we’re bored, and to be honest, we’re kinda horny. So we thought it might be about time to give you something juicy to occupy your mind (and potentially other parts). We haven’t had a lot of kinky blog posts in a while, and you know we’re quite sex-positive here at iHeartBerlin, so we wanna offer you a bit of entertainment here, and possibly on the following Sundays. The “Short Sunday” used to be a category on iHeartBerlin many many years ago where we presented short films and video clips we found extra cute, so now might be a good time to get back to this tradition.
We wanna start something with a little bit more depth, we thought. A friend of ours sent us a relatively new short film about the obsession of a certain type of masculinity. The film is not really related to Berlin, but it’s an interesting watch nonetheless. We did a bit of research and found four more short films (some of which are actually related to Berlin) that all deal with the topic of complex sexuality in different ways and we thought this would make a great little short film program. To our delight, these five films even cover a wide spectrum of sexual orientations, from straight to gay, lesbian and bi. Hurrah! So without further ado, we let you dive right into it:
photos: Kinga Cichewicz.
Just when I thought that being single in Berlin couldn’t possibly get any harder, the level of difficulty has skyrocketed because of the pandemic. It feels like suddenly, one is basically stripped of all the cool Berlin single life privileges but has to carry all of its burdens. Ironically, in pre-Corona times, singles would sometimes get annoyed by some of the very things that actually can bring us solace in the current circumstances of isolation.