By Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier

Casting his mind back to Berlin in 1991, where he made his playful short Liebe, Eifersucht und Rache, director Michael Brynntrup remembers a newly unified country insistent on serving itself. The goal of the state, as he remembers, was to make this newly assembled country visibly comprised of one harmonious whole. Yet, despite what he considers the excess of nationalist propaganda he encountered frequently, daily life could still feel as though it were split into “two German parts.”

Describing the mood of the country following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Brynntrup underlines a gesture of historical theatre: the reburial of Prussian king Frederick the Great in Potsdam, an exercise intended to invoke “a big propaganda effect.” The message behind this significant act, as he recalls, was internal as much as external. “We are now a nation,” he says of these public reunification efforts. “We have to show it, but especially for ourselves.”

That performance carried a darker charge, however. There was a feeling that national pride was state-sanctioned, with Brynntrup emphasising, “People were empowered, or forced, to speak out loud. We are proud to be Germans! That had some effect against asylum seekers.” The period remained a tense time of shifting national identity, tilting toward extremes of national pride after the country had been split in two for so many years.

This was not always a good thing: Brynntrup remembers riots and attacks that took place on the buildings where ethnic communities were known to be housed. “Oh, my God,” he remembers of this time, “there is so much worrying around this atmosphere…”

Liebe, Eifersucht und Rache, then, was made within this pressurised environment. Taking the format of an educational video on German language phrases for foreigners, Brynntrup wryly describes the film as, “German, for Germans! More, really, like a lecture; a lesson for Germans.”

Less concerned with smoothing itself into international legibility than with speaking to the society around it, the sardonic tone of the film is reflected in its location: a leather bar, hosting a phone conversation between an escort and a patron looking for sex. The conversation that follows amusingly flits between flirtation and threat.

“It was actually all shot on one location,” Brynntrup says. “In the SchwuZ; it was like the party place!” The film now exists as an unexpected time capsule, following the closure of this iconic queer venue in November 2025.

Styling the ‘set’ for Brynntrup’s film was achieved by splitting the interior in two, with the bar area dressed in “a bit more like a leather-bar style,” while “on the other side we created a space which looks like a private setting,” which is where the film’s escort character makes her phone call to the leather bar patron.

Preparation, Brynntrup insists, was undertaken “very spontaneously! Friends arrived with props and costumes and makeup, and whatever,” all of it sourced from a drag store and then assembled on the spot. Much of the shooting process followed this ad hoc style of production.

On the first day, for instance, Brynntrup discovered the location has only one light. “The next day,” he says, “we were learning by doing,” bringing in more lighting equipment in aid of “better images” that aligned with his directorial vision.

Looking back, Brynntrup is wary of the easy, often misleading narratives surrounding the sense of community that has been lost in the digital age. That weakened community spirit in queer circles is not due to the advent of social media, Brynntrup argues, but rather one driven by economic shifts.

“Back in ’91, everybody could manage a cheap living,” he offers. “We had spare time to do creative, cultural things like filmmaking. Today, the living situation is more stressful: people have to struggle first to pay the rent, and then see if there is time for creativity.”

The changing economic landscape of Berlin following reunification is one that Brynntrup regards as less a moral failing than a consequence of a new world order. “The community is more commercialised,” he admits, but these were changes that he had already noticed.

“You could see this change in the ‘80s, and especially in the ‘90s.” Back then, he remembers “starting a little newspaper on a Xerox machine; it was very cheap, done only by energy, and not money.” Now, he says, the creative impetus of the queer community has altered: “Everybody needs, first, money.”

Regarding the film now within his overarching body of work, Brynntrup rejects the hierarchy between what he calls ‘major’ work, such as a feature film, and something improvised. “I can’t divide spontaneous and major work,” he says. Instead, he posits, the best experimental films “offer a feeling of spontaneity, an easy-done statement.”

In light of all this, he hopes today that he is “still spontaneous.” His long-term residency in Berlin has enabled this to a large part, keeping his work visible and publicly accessible. Much of this visibility has been facilitated by the Berlinale film festival, in particular its alternative programming segment, Panorama.

“I am very thankful for the possibility at Panorama, to show these little films,” he says warmly, “from the [queer] scene, for the scene, in an international, big festival!” In the intervening years since Liebe, Eifersucht und Rache, Brynntrup speculates that more than 10 of his films have premiered at the Berlinale.

Yet the so-called ‘little film’ that first flickered onto the silver screen nearly 35 years ago still remains in regular circulation. Liebe, Eifersucht und Rache remains something of an audience favourite, with Brynntrup sharing that it is still shown very often, even being programmed in a collection of his films in Japan in December 2025.

Despite its brazenly queer content, Brynntrup proudly shares, “The film is accepted; people like it! This is feedback I enjoy very much. For me, it’s fine that the film is still relevant.”

As one of the 14 selected films programmed in the retrospective of the 40^th TEDDY AWARD, Brynntrup admits that he is honoured to be included among such fine filmmaking company. Seeing the film again now, after so much time has passed, he notes the change in perspective over the years.

“We have, now, other eyes positioned to see these films. The TEDDY was the first big gay prize in a festival with an international effect,” he says. “It began as a small event and has become bigger and bigger… The basic effect is very important,” he says of the prize’s heightened visibility for queer filmmakers and storytelling.  

In an amusing, final reflection, Brynntrup shares that Berlinale protocol would always insist that he be collected by a limousine for each of his film premieres. He declined every time.

“I went by subway!” he says. “Being pampered like that is not my style.” On that same note, Liebe, Eifersucht und Rache carries the same aura of simple, unvarnished personality. It remains, in the words of its director, “a very basic, authentic film from that period.”