The change of the new generation at the Berlinale begins: After 24 years, Wieland Speck retires as head of the Panorama section. Directors and festival organisers remember:
“I could tell a thousand stories I’ve experienced with him. Our first trip together was to New York…”
Category Archives: Blog
In conversation with Mahmoud Hassino
“I don’t see myself as a gay refugee”
These are the words Mahmoud Hassino casually remarks just minutes into our conversation. Oscar and I look quizzical: this is the man who’s made a name for himself by founding the first gay Syrian blog Mawaleh, starring in the documentary Mr Gay Syria, and fighting tirelessly for LGBT and refugee rights. How is it, then, that he can so easily shed the term ‘gay’ when that forms such a significant basis for the activism upon which his right to asylum rests? The answer is that this is not a denial of gay identity, but an empowered decision choose one’s own labels, rather than have them imposed: “homosexuality is just some thing, some part of my identity… we have many ways of introducing ourselves; I can say a journalist or blogger or writer. Sometimes you choose something that is more necessary.” Continue reading In conversation with Mahmoud Hassino
The TEDDY films 2018!
Here you’ll find a taste of what’s to come in the 32nd TEDDY AWARD at the Berlinale, taking place from 15th – 25th February. Throughout the festival we’ll be interviewing the directors and teams behind the TEDDY films, which you can catch on our YouTube channel: For more details on the TEDDY AWARD 2018, check out our programme magazine
Bixa Travesty (Tranny Fag)
Director: Claudia Priscilla, Kiko Goifman Brazil 2018, 75′, Portuguese
Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033
Director: Zach Blas, USA/Great Britain 2018 29′, English, Spanish
Der Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth)
Director: Reinhold Schünzel, Alfred Schirokauer Germany 1927, 113′, German intertitles
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot
Director: Gus Van Sant USA 2018 113′, English
Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith
Evidentiary Bodies
Director: Barbara Hammer USA 2018, 10′, Without dialogue
Game Girls
Director: Alina Skrzeszewska France/Germany 2018 90′, English
Garbage
Director: Q India 2018 105′, Hindi
High Fantasy
Director: Jenna Bass South Africa 2017 74′, English
Je fais où tu me dis (Dressed for Pleasure)
Director: Marie de Maricourt Switzerland 2017 17′, French
Juck
L’ Animale
Director: Katharina Mückstein Austria 2018 97′, German
In Austria the final school exam is known as the ‘Matura’. Unlike the German word ‘Abitur’ (from the Latin ‘abire’ meaning ‘to walk away’), the Austrian term also includes the notion of coming of age. Mati wants to become a veterinary doctor, like her mother, and therefore leave the confines of her small-town universe for Vienna. But is she ready for this future? Standing in her ‘Matura’ dress with her long hair scraped back into a tight bun and her neck hair shaved bare, she’d be the first to admit she looks like a clown. Mati loves to spend time with the boys bombing around the quarry on her motocross bike. When one of the girls from her school resists when one of Mati’s mates begins sexually harassing her at a disco, Mati spits in her face. But, just like her parent’s marriage, Mati’s motocross gang also ruptures once notions of friendship, love and sexuality become more pressing. In her second feature-length drama, Katharina Mückstein uses clear words and images and cool synthesiser beats to tell the story of an inscrutable young woman on the brink of ‘walking away’. Her parents’ silence tells us that being mature and facing up to the future doesn’t have anything to do with your age. Info: http://teddyaward.tv/en/archive?a-z=1&select=L&id_film=780
Las herederas (The Heiresses)
Director: Marcelo Martinessi Paraguay/Uruguay/Germany/Brazil/Norway/ France 2018, 95′, Spanish
Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern (Ludwig II of Bavaria)
Director: Wilhelm Dieterle Germany 1930, 132′, German intertitles
Malambo, el hombre bueno (Malambo, the Good Man)
Director: Santiago Loza Argentina 2017 71′, Spanish
Marilyn
Director: Martín Rodríguez Redondo Argentina/Chile 2018 80′, Spanish
Mes provinciales (A Paris Education)
Director: Jean Paul Civeyrac France 2018 136′, French
Obscuro Barroco
Director: Evangelia Kranioti France/Greece 2018 60′, Portuguese
Onde o Verão Vai (episódios da juventude)/ Where the Summer Goes (chapters on youth)
Director: David Pinheiro Vicente Portugal 2018 20′, Portuguese
Para Aduma (Red Cow)
Director: Tsivia Barkai Yacov Israel 2018 90′, Hebrew
Pasolini
Pop Rox
Director: Nate Trinrud USA 2017 14′, English
Retablo
Director: Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio L. Peru/Germany/Norway 2017 101′, Quechua, Spanish
River’s Edge
Director: Isao Yukisada Japan 2018 118′, Japanese
Shakedown
Director: Leilah Weinraub USA 2018 82′, English
The Happy Prince
The Silk and the Flame
Director: Jordan Schiele USA 2018 87′, Mandarin, English
Three Centimetres
Director: Lara Zeidan Great Britain 2017 9′, Arabic
Tinta Bruta (Hard Paint)
Director: Marcio Reolon, Filipe Matzembacher Brazil 2018 118′, Portuguese
Touch Me Not
T.R.A.P
Director: Manque La Banca Argentina 2018 16′, Spanish
Tuzdan kaide (The Pillar of Salt)
Director: Burak Çevik Turkey 2018 70′, Turkish
Yours in Sisterhood
Director: Irene Lusztig USA 2018 101′, English
The TEDDY Jury 2018
This is the TEDDY AWARD Jury 2018
Antonio Harfuch
Antonio Harfuch is a content producer and film curator living in Mexico City. He has worked in several media production companies including Zamora Films, The Maestros, Redrum, Piano Films. Since 2015 he has been a film curator for the Morelia International Film Festival, one of the most influential film festivals in Latin America that just celebrated 15 years, where he is also part of the team producing content for the festival’s social media. He is the founder & coordinator of the Genre and Sexual Diversity Section for the Morelia International Film Festival, a program of Mexican queer shorts films that emerged from this festival. He is strongly committed with the promotion of LGBT films and more broadly with films that showcase the richness of human diversity. He is currently a columnist on film for Fusion, a Spanish language news and cultural website.
Bohdan Zhuk
Bohdan Zhuk is a programmer for the Kyiv International Film Festival Molodist, Ukraine’s biggest film fest (47th edition to take place in 2018) since 2014. He’s the curator of its LGBTQ programme Sunny Bunny, which has been part of the festival since 2001 and is Ukraine’s oldest regular queer-themed event. Under his curatorship, the programme was expanded and reformatted into a competition of fiction features and non-competition screenings of documentaries and classic films, and developed partnerships with the country’s leading LGBTQ organisations, as well as Equality festival (held in several cities) and Kyiv Pride. With a master’s in linguistics and a background as translator, radio journalist and host, he also works as communications manager for the British Council in Ukraine, writes articles about cinema, and translates films for national releases (most recently David Lynch: The Art Life, Moonlight, etc.).
Franck Finance-Madureira
Franck Finance-Madureira is a french movie journalist based in Paris. He’s the co-editor-in-chief of FrenchMania, a website and a magazine dedicated to cinema and tv series through the lens of francophony. He is a member of French Syndicate of Cinema Critics.
In 2010, he created the Queer Palm, the LGBTQI award of Cannes Film Festival which baseline is “Open minded award since 2010”.
Marthe Djilo Kamga
One of the founders and coordinators of the Massimadi Festival in Brussels, Marthe Djilo Kamga’s professional and personal career has always been driven by issues of anchors, vulnerabilities, multiple identities and equal opportunities. Recently, it is through artistic creations and cultural productions (cinema, performances, photos, etc.) that she tackles the questions of the reappropriation of public spaces and the production of images and archives by people in situations of invisibility. She says she is neither militant nor researcher. Enriched by a academic journey rather scientific and social, she defines herself as a thwarted artist in self-therapy. She touches everything, and constantly wonders if a single life would be enough to satiate all her inquisitiveness…
Among others, In 2009, Marthe also published in the collection of Cahiers de l’Université des Femmes a book titled : Quand les femmes aiment d’autres femmes: regard sur les homosexualités féminines au Cameroun.
In 2017, she co-wrote and directed a film : Vibrancy of Silence: A Discussion with My Sisters, the first part of Frieda Ekotto’s visual research project on Vibrancy of Silence: Archiving Images and Cultural Production of Sub-Saharan African Women.
Natascha Frankenberg
Natascha Frankenberg is the programmer of begehrt!, the queer film section of the International Women’s Film Festival Dortmund|Cologne. She is a film and media scholar and is currently doing her doctorate. Her PhD dissertation deals with the study of temporality in queer studies and in queer documentary films. She was a research assistant at the Institute for Media Studies in Bochum and a research associate at the Helene Lange College: Queer Studies and Intermediality: Art – Music – Media Culture at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. Her article When and where will queer film have been? Not a Coming-of-Age Story is part of Dagmar Brunow and Simon Dickel’s anthology Queer Cinema which will be published for the Berlinale 2018 by Ventil Verlag. The volume Perverse Assemblages. Queering Heteronormative Orders inter/medially, co-edited by Frankenberg in collaboration with the Helene Lange Kolleg, will also be published in 2018.
Pecha Lo
Pecha Lo hat ihren Master-Abschluss in Filmgeschichte und visuellen Medien an der Birkbeck University in London gemacht, wo sie fachliches Wissen von Laura Mulvey erlernte und starkes Interesse an Film und Theorien über Feminismus und Gender Equality entwickelte. Aktuell arbeitet sie als Generalsekretärin in der Taiwan Women’s Film
Association und ist Festivalleitung des internationalen Women Make Waves Film Festival in Taipei, Taiwans drittgrößtem Filmfestival und Festival nur für Frauen. Seine Queer-Sektion ist einflussreich, gilt als Kult und hat über die letzten 24 Jahre massiv an Zuschauerschaft gewonnen. Pecha hält auch Vorlesungen über Film an Volkshochschulen, ist freischaffende Filmkritikerin und tritt für die Bewegung von LGBT-Rechten in Taiwan ein. In der Vergangenheit war sie in der Jury des Seoul International Women’s Film Festivals (2014), des Network of Asian Women Film Festivals (NAWFF-Award, 2013-2017), des International Women’s Film Festivals Dortmund | Cologne (2017) und des London Feminist Film Festivals (2017).
Roisín Geraghty
Roisín Geraghty ist Producerin, Programmerin und Festivalmanagerin mit Erfahrung in Film- und Festivalproduktion sowohl in Irland als auch den USA. Aktuell ist sie Filmprogrammerin für das GAZE International LGBT Film Festival. In der Vergangenheit arbeitete sie für das Cork Film Festival, das Galway Film Fleadh and Guth Gafa International Documentary Film Festival in Irland wie auch das Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) und das Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Sie interessiert sich für die Umsetzung, Kuration und Verbreitung von unabhängigen Spiel- und Dokumentarfilmen und engagiert sich für sowohl kreative als auch wirtschaftliche Bereiche von Film.
TEDDY goes Oscars
YESS! Another good reason to look forward to the TEDDY 2018 edition.
Three TEDDY AWARD 2017 films are nominated for the Oscars: “Call Me By Your Name“ by Luca Guadagnino for Best Actor, Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Original Song, “Strong Island“ by Yance Ford for Best Documentary Feature as well as last year’s TEDDY AWARD winner Una mujer fantástica by Sebastián Lelio for Best Foreign Language Film.
Congrats and fingers crossed!