Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate

Eldorado was a nightclub in Berlin in the 1920s. Inside were trans women, gay men and cabaret performers; the city had the most open queer scene in Europe. In the same period Magnus Hirschfeld's institute was researching sexuality and performing the world's first gender-affirming surgeries. When the Nazis took power in 1933 the club was closed, the institute's archive was burned in the street, and most of its regulars were sent to the camps. The documentary by Benjamin Cantu and Matt Lambert tells the period through both the club and individual people. At the centre of the narrative is how quickly a freedom that looked won can be taken back. The film also covers homosexual figures inside the Nazi movement, such as Ernst Röhm, and that is its most complicated section. Historians and relatives of survivors speak. Who it's for: Viewers of queer history, Weimar Berlin, and documentaries about the Nazi period. Who it's not for: The subject is persecution and extermination and some passages are heavy. The reenactments also mix in with the archive footage.