The flowers of silence

of Will Seefried
Great Britain • 2025 • 1h39 • Vostf
With Fionn O’Shea, Robert Aramayo, Erin Kellyman, Louis Hofmann

In England of the 1920s, Owen James, a gay novelist and Dorothy, his psychiatric nurse, developed an improbable friendship during a series of “rendez-vous” prescribed by the medical body. Through their conversations, he tells him the story of his relationship with a long-standing friend, who degenerated when they resorted to a risky procedure to try to eradicate the forbidden feelings they felt for each other.

This first very aesthetic feature films the forced "healings" of homosexuals in the 1920s in the UK. Documented by the book “ Curing Queers” by Quentin Dickinson, he refers to the controversial work of Eugen Steinach, an Austrian endocrinologist famous for his experiences of “care” homosexuality. Magnus Hirschfeld used Steinach’s theory to anchor a new biological model of homosexuality, claiming that gays were neither sick nor depraved but formed a third sex, a separate and autonomous group of organically feminized men.

Following a meeting with Marc Lamonzie, PhD student in contemporary history at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne and specialist in male homosexuality from the late nineteenth to the Second World War.

As part of the tribute to Magnus Hirschfeld and Lionel Soukaz