William Shakespeare died four-hundred years ago; however, the bard has stubbornly refused to remain truly lifeless. To this day, Shakespeare’s works are taken up and adapted by dramatists, visual artists, and musicians. Shakespeare is a regular on the big screen, too – not least in the field of queer cinema. In certain cases, it is easy to establish a link. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, deals among other things with a love that is rejected by its social environment. Many LGBTQ filmmakers have reworked this story, including Julien Eger in his short film Le baiser, shown together with Were the World Mine, a playful take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream – one of the many Shakespearean comedies that revolves around disguise and the turmoils of love. Shakespeare and his Romeo and Juliet also play small, but important roles in Léa Pool’s Lost and Delirious as well as Géza von Radványis Mädchen in Uniform.

Even such seemingly unwieldy texts like Shakespeare’s sonnets have inspired deeply moving films. The homoerotic, lyrical aspects of the poems are at the center of Derek Jarman’s cinematic meditiation The Angelic Conversation. By contrast, the short film To the Marriage of True Minds concentrates on the way the sonnets have resonated beyond all kinds of borders: of gender, of language, and of origin.