Behind Closed Doors: Videos by Hugo Ljungbäck | Arts + Literature Laboratory | Madison Contemporary Arts Center

Behind Closed Doors: Videos by Hugo Ljungbäck

Mills Folly Microcinema welcomes filmmaker and scholar Hugo Ljungbäck for Behind Closed Doors, a program of his short videos, on Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at 7:00pm. Suggested donation: $5.00. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Hugo Ljungbäck is a Swedish filmmaker, archivist, curator, and media scholar. His videos explore queer history, identity, representation, and sexuality through an autobiographical lens, emphasizing the possibilities afforded by found footage filmmaking in response to the ephemerality of queer history. By using appropriated text, photos, sound, and video to make visible the hidden, sometimes unflattering, and often unarchivable traces of queer experience, his work builds a makeshift archive of love letters, home movies, YouTube videos, sex tapes, spam emails, physique magazines, propaganda films, and selfies. This hour-long program presents the first survey of his work spanning the past eight years. Please note that some of the videos feature sexually explicit materials.

 

ABOUT MILLS FOLLY MICROCINEMA

Mills Folly Microcinema showcases nationally recognized experimental film and video art from the festival and microcinema circuit. We network with regional filmmakers and organizations to bring filmmakers and guest programmers to Madison for screenings. And we incubate local experimental filmmaking by providing screen time at Project Projection events.  

Hugo Ljungbäck holds a BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently a PhD Student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His videos have screened at festivals, galleries, and museums internationally and are distributed worldwide by Vtape and Light Cone.

He is currently developing a dissertation project on mid-century queer home movies and amateur films, an almost wholly overlooked chapter of the history of queer cinema. The first part of this project, an essay on François Reichenbach’s amateur filmmaking activities throughout the early 1950s, won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Queer and Trans Caucus Chris Holmlund Prize and is forthcoming in New... Read More

This event is made possible by support from Dane Arts; Madison Arts Commission with additional funds from Wisconsin Arts Board. Additional funds also provided by Endres Manufacturing Company Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, Inc., charitable arm of The Capital Times, the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation, and the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation. Support also provided by a generous anonymous donor.

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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.

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