IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345330

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The doctor and sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a media star of the sexual reform movement of the 1910s and 1920s: he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, published the yearbook for sexual intermediate stages, worked as an expert in litigation, was an advisor to numerous feature films on sexual subjects, and was director the Berlin Institute for Sexology published dozens of books and traveled the country with lectures. In 1919 he appeared in Richard Oswald's film OTHER THAN THE OTHER, which promoted the understanding of homosexuality and the abolition of paragraph 175. The film sparked fierce controversy and ultimately led to the reintroduction of state censorship, which was abolished after the First World War, and the film was banned.

When Richard Oswald's film production company was dissolved in 1927, Hirschfeld was able to fall back on DIFFERENT THAN THE OTHER. He designed the film LAWS OF LOVE, which is a large-scale cultural film in five chapters dealing with the gender of plants, animals and humans, and deals with the "tragedy of a homosexual" in chapter 6. But on October 12, 1927, LAWS OF LOVE was banned by the Berlin film supervisory authority for public screenings, because "his intention to explain the nature of homosexuality was in no way carried out with scientific objectivity", the screening of the "anomalies shown on living persons and abnormalities "forbid" for the general reasons of decency and good manners "and it is" all deterring and enlightening the youth in a healthy direction.

On October 30, 1927, the film was submitted to censorship a second time, this time in a revised version that was originally shortened from six files (2,474 meters) to four files (2,035 meters), in which the last chapter was completely omitted. After the fourth act was shortened by “the representation of human anomalies and abnormalities” (279 meters by 531 meters), this version was approved for public demonstration with a ban on young people on November 9 and was shown twice on November 16 in the Beba Palace Atrium. Magnus Hirschfeld supplemented the film with a lecture in which he showed the forbidden parts "in a standing photograph".

The only surviving copy of LAWS OF LOVE has Ukrainian subtitles and goes back to the released version of the second censorship template. A 487 meter long version of Chapter 5 has also been preserved with Ukrainian titles. In 2019, the Filmmuseum Munich tried to restore the original version of LAWS OF LOVE. The wording of the subtitles was largely taken from a booklet sold in 1927 when the film was screened and a censorship card from August 12, 1932. Missing parts of the film were replaced by corresponding photos, almost all of which were published by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld come from. The Begelit music for piano and violin was recorded by Günter A. Buchwald in 2020.

 —Stefan Drößler, Director of Filmmuseum München

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- General -
Container:  Matroska
Runtime:    1 h 41 min
Size:       2.72 GiB

- Video -
Codec:         x264
Resolution:    1920x1080
Aspect ratio:  16:9
Frame rate:    25.000 fps
Bit rate:        3 588 kb/s
BPP:            0.069

- Audio -
#1:  zxx 2.0ch AAC @ 253 kb/s

File size: 2.72GB

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