Frameline Distribution Acquires NA Rights To Music-Driven, Gravity-Defying ‘Doppelgängers³’ Ahead Of Berlinale Private Screening
EXCLUSIVE: Frameline Distribution has acquired North American distribution rights to Doppelgängers³, a film directed by Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian that’s described as a “freewheeling filmic essay-meets-documentary, which takes questions of gender, history, and free thinking to the frontiers of space exploration.”
The nonprofit Frameline Distribution plans a limited theatrical release for Doppelgängers³ in major U.S. cities in fall 2025. A private screening of the documentary will be held in conjunction with the Berlinale on Wednesday, Feb. 19 at Soho House Berlin, to be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and Allegra Madsen — Frameline’s executive director and a member of the jury for the Berlinale’s 2025 Teddy Award (a prize that goes to the festival’s top Queer film). Dr. Ben Hayoun-Stépanian has been selected as one of the “world’s top 200 filmmakers” for Berlinale Talents in 2025 from among 3,800 applicants around the globe.
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Doppelgängers³, featuring music by Pussy Riot, Colin Self, Mirrored Fatality, and Asmodessa, “challenges us to defy power structures and reject planetary exploitation by letting go of the constraints of borders, gender, and religion to embrace what diversity could be in the vast landscape of our imaginations,” notes the program for Frameline48 –the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival where the documentary screened last year after its world premiere at SXSW.
”I am so thrilled and honored to be able to work with Frameline Distribution, which represents a roster of avant-garde directors, to bring my new film to North American audiences,” Dr. Ben Hayoun-Stépanian said in a statement. “Doppelgängers³ is a visual and sonic experience on diasporic and ecofeminist futures in space at a critical time where the dream of space exploration is increasingly a concern of private corporations and the super wealthy. More than a conventional science documentary, Doppelgängers³ confronts ideas of extraction, colonization and profiteering that have wrought so much damage on Earth—and it urges a reconsideration of space exploration through a lens that values inclusivity, queer, and transnational thinking.”
The nonprofit Frameline Distribution is the 44-year-old division of the Frameline festival. Doppelgängers³ joins a distinguished catalogue of Frameline Distribution titles including Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, Jenni Olson’s Blue Diary, and Sam Feder’s Disclosure, “among many other groundbreaking queer and trans films.”
“Doppelgängers³ is one of the most exciting uses of documentary and we’re thrilled to add the film to Frameline Distribution’s catalog,” observed Matthew Wong, Frameline’s distribution manager. “Nelly brings a playful authenticity to the film that makes larger-than-life ideas feel accessible and universal, while bringing in queerness to envision this necessary inclusive space.”
Dr. Ben Hayoun-Stépanian is a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. As noted in her bio, “she chairs international sessions with diplomats on the needs for the demilitarization and decolonization of outer space.” In 2012 she established the International Space Orchestra—the world’s first orchestra of NASA scientists. Doppelgängers³ is her fifth documentary feature.
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