Bleifrei 95
Three friends in their mid-twenties reunite at the place of their youth, where they must renegotiate their friendship between gas station cruising, motorways, and the world’s oldest lesbian bar.
Bleifrei 95 (“Unleaded 95”), a short film by the directing duo of Emma Hütt and Tina Muffler, seeks out spaces that are occupied by masculinity, and transforms them into queer lesbian spaces. Toilets at a highway exit gas station become a place for anonymous lesbian sex; a mother also uses the restroom for this purpose while her husband and child sit cluelessly waiting for the gas tank to be refilled. No words are needed to get desire up and running.
The film centers on three longtime friends in their mid-twenties: Aino, Toni, and Lolly. Aino is celebrating her bachelorette party. Toni works at the gas station and was once briefly with Aino; Lolly has moved away, but always has sex with Aino’s mother whenever she returns to her hometown. The secrecy of this on-off relationship again leads to an argument. Lolly goes partying on her own, drifting through the night dazed and inebriated. She meets a few guys, gets high with them, and annoys them with her lesbian lovesickness.
The film creates a fragile mood. Beneath the healthy surface lie secrets and wounds from the past. In this atmospherically dense film, lightness and heaviness, high spirits and comedowns are often only a blink of an eye away. Will the three of them manage to renegotiate their friendship? They all converge in an old-fashioned bar – in a scene which was filmed in one of the oldest lesbian bars in Germany, La Gata in Frankfurt.
With ease and enthusiasm, the two directors establish a queer everyday life within a homophobic reality. This peripheral road movie remains pleasantly unpredictable, dealing with intense moments, free spaces beyond bourgeois norms, and the beauty and fragility of friendship in times of upheaval. (Karin Cerny)
Translation: John Wojtowicz
Directors' Statement
Bleifrei 95 is a coming-of-age film born out of the chaos of queer second puberty. It formulates a place of longing: whether it’s queer-lesbian cruising, beating up guys in your favorite bar, or promising to love each other—even if you fuck each other’s mother in a 6-minute 38-second car wash. Aino, Toni, and Lolly rush through the film in a blur of adrenaline, energy, and horniness.
We - Tina and Emma - met in our early twenties during our studies in Giessen, Germany. Amidst this gray wasteland we found a queer community opposing the smalltown monotony. If you're queer in Giessen and want to have a good time, you have to build your own universe. The places that were already built in the past were all the more important. So we made regular journeys to La Gata - the self-proclaimed oldest lesbian bar in the world in Frankfurt am Main. By closing itself off from the outside world, La Gata opened up an entirely different world within. And it was precisely this magic that we wanted to capture on film.
That’s why we filmed at La Gata—and with the people of its queer-lesbian community: our friends, the bar’s regulars, the most notorious dykes from Berlin, Queer Bikes Berlin, and everyone who wanted to cruise. Because cruising, which is a practice of anonymous sex mainly practiced by gay men, is hardly available to queer-lesbian people of our generation. Through Bleifrei 95, we want to show our vision of friendship and the complexities of queer relationships. Our three protagonists are friends, colleagues, mothers, brothers, lovers – they love each other, argue, long for each other, hurt each other - and in the middle of all these contradictions, they come together again and again.
Bleifrei 95
2025
Germany, Austria
24 min