Tag Archives: patric chiha

TEDDY TODAY: 16th of februar 2023

It’s that time again! The 73rd Berlinale is about to begin. To make sure you don’t miss any of the LGBTQIA+ films premiering at the Berlinale, we’ll introduce you to a few films every day with a blog post.


Starting today, you can find all the information about our TEDDY films here – with the theaters where the film is playing including date and time.

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PREMIERES:

La Bête dans la jungle

Directed by: Patric Chiha
France, Belgium, Austria, 2023, 103′

Film still La Bête dans la jungle | The Beast in the Jungle © Elsa Okazaki

It begins at the end of the 1970s, amidst the glittering nights of a club as a place of endless (im)possibilities and the timeless clockworkof a city. This is where John and May are waiting for an extraordinary, all-changing moment to occur. Around them, everything is loud and in motion, while they hold out in silence. Twenty-five years pass as they follow world events on their cathode-ray tube television set: Mitterrand’s term in office, the AIDS crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11. John’s obsessive watching and waiting for this one big event to happen becomes a monster, and May is his long-suffering accomplice. From 1979 to 2004: from disco to techno. Fashions, movements and drugs change as they dance against time which passes by more and more quickly. Lost among others yet alone together, the two continue to observe the world from the sidelines. If only it were love. Patric Chiha transposes the couple from Henry James’s short story “The Beast in the Jungle” to the club, and contrasts their fateful waiting with the ultimate feeling of being-in-the-moment and the dancers’ hedonistic desire to dissolve time in everlasting choreographies.

SCREENING TIMES:

16.02. / 19:15 CinemaxX 10

Kill Boksoon

Directed by: Byun Sung-hyun
South Korea, 2023, 137′

Film still Kill Boksoon © No Ju-han | Netflix

Gil Boksoon leads a double life. She is both the mother of a teenage daughter, whom she is raising on her own, and a legendary professional killer at top-tier killing agency MK Ent. One could even say that she is better at killing people than raising them. But one day, either out of motherly instinct or simply because there are limits to what even the ruthless Boksoon is willing to do, she refuses to complete an assignment. In doing so, she herself becomes a target. In Kill Boksoon, director Byun Sung-hyun invites us into an astonishing, chilling world in which a killing agency offers an elite path to success and wealth, and talent scouting is all about spotting promising psychopaths and orphans who have nothing to lose. While Boksoon’s daughter is immersed in feelings typical of teenage turmoil, the emotional thermometers of her elders drop to sub-zero temperatures. The leading figures among these cold-blooded assassins are played by the brilliant Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu, inroles that are a million miles away from their cult melodramatic performances in filmmaker Lee Chang-dong’s work. Their characters’almost preternatural fighting skills allow for some spectacular set pieces that will blow your mind – hopefully not literally.

SCREENING TIMES:

16.02. / 18:30 CinemaxX 8
16.02. / 18:30 CinemaxX 9

Mammalia

Directed by: Sebastian Mihilescu
Romania, Poland, Germany, 2023, 88′

Film still Mammalia © microFILM

One of the many virtues of Sebastian Mihilescu’s startling first feature Mammalia is that you never know where he’s taking you. From one scene to another, the film is always unpredictable, even disconcerting. This is the same feeling Camil (István Téglás), a troubled young man, experiences. He feels diminished and insecure with the women around him, especially with his partner, who disappears to join a secret community of women dedicated to eerie fertility rituals somewhere near a lake. But Mammalia rejects the very notion of synopsis. In the surrealist tradition, Mihilescu works with free associations, some of them as funny as they are unsettling, like when the shadow of Camil’s bald head over his partner’s naked body begins to look like a huge penis. A dream or wishful thinking? Masculinity and gender roles are always at stake in Mammalia, and always in crisis. Shot on vivid 16mm by Barbu Bloiu (DoP on Cristi Puiu’sSieranevada), Mammalia privileges fixed shots with movements within the frame, and the use of space is always very expressive. Itsweird humor is reminiscent of Roy Andersson. But Romania has its own tradition, that of Eugen Ionescu and The Theatre of the Absurd.

SCREENING TIMES:

16.02. / 17:00 Kino Arsenal 1

Notre Corps

Directed by: Claire Simon
France, 2023, 168′

Film still Notre corps | Our Body © Madison Films

A teenager is sitting in the doctor’s consultation room, the camera films her from behind so that she remains anonymous. She tells the doctor how she got pregnant. Her boyfriend had assured her he would take care. Now she has to make a difficult decision. You can feel her anguish in every sentence she utters. And there’s no sign of the boyfriend. This is one of the the first scenes in Claire Simon’s impressive documentary Notre corps. With a gaze full of tenderness, the French director looks around a gynaecology clinic in Paris, collecting scenes of births and cancer diagnoses, consultations on endometriosis and hormone therapy for an older trans woman. The film that emerges along the way starts off observational before becoming ever more personal, a film about what it means to live in a female body and a wonderful example of the power of documentary cinema. Notre corps gathers together experiences with which one usually feels left alone; it makes the structures visible that deem troubles individual; it reveals the extent to which the things we don’t dare to talk about have a societal dimension and need to be discussed.

SCREENING TIMES:

16.02. / 11:00 Kino Arsenal 1

Perpetrator

Directed by: Jennifer Reeder
USA, 2023, 100′
TEDDY nominated

Film still Perpetrator © WTFilms

Jonny is tough, fearless and forthright. She picks locks with ease and seems to be able to take care of herself pretty well. She also slips rent money into her single father’s pocket. Their relationship is fragile and yet strangely symbiotic. Feeling overstretched, her father decides to send Jonny to live with a distant aunt. But even in the care of the strict Hildie, the teenager cannot seem to find peace. On her18th birthday, Jonny is given a cake baked according to a magical family recipe which triggers a radical metamorphosis. At her new school, the constant killing spree-emergency drills create a tense atmosphere and soon five girls go missing. Inexplicably fascinated by their disappearance, Jonny sets out to look for clues and a blood-soaked coming-of-age story takes its course. Jennifer Reeder’s new feature-length film is a dark, queer-feminist genre mix of body horror, gore and mystery. As in her earlier works, she looks at the world predominantly through the eyes of her young protagonists who, armed with biting humour and an unbroken sense of justice, manage to wrest moments of light-heartedness and solidarity from the twisted world of adults.

SCREENING TIMES:

16.02. / 21:15 CinemaxX 10

Learn more about the film in our interview with Jennifer Reeder.

RERUNS:

Kill Boksoon
16.02. / 21:30 CinemaxX 5
16.02. / 21:30 CinemaxX 6
16.02. / 21:45 CinemaxX 8
16.02. / 21:45 CinemaxX 9

All films 2023

You can find the full overview of queer films presented at the 37. TEDDY Awards here. Presentations of films from former TEDDY editions are available in our film database.

FEATURE FILMS

All Feature Films at 37th TEDDY AWARD

DOCUMENTARY / ESSAY FILMS

All Documentary Films at 36th TEDDY AWARD

SHORT FILMS

All Short Films at 37th TEDDY AWARD

EXHIBITIONS

Film still Un gif larguísimo | A Very Long Gif © Eduardo Williams

SERIES

Film still Bad Behaviour © Sarah Enticknap

TEDDY AWARD Ceremony

For all of you who couldn’t attend the award ceremony, whose livestreams were lagging, or who just want to rewatch their favourite moments: Here’s the complete TEDDY award show on YouTube!

And here are some individual time stamps:

THE TEDDY AWARD WINNERS 2020

This is the moment you’ve all been waiting for! The jury has chosen this year’s TEDDY Award winners! We’re so excited to announce the freshly selected award winning films:

Best FEATURE Film

Nominees:
– Shirley, dir. Josephine Decker
– Futur Drei, dir. Faraz Shariat
– The Twentieth Century, dir. Matthew Rankin

Winner:
Futur Drei, dir. Faraz Shariat
 
You can read more about the movie on the TEDDY blog and below you can watch our interview with Fariaz Shariat:

Best DOCUMENTARY

Nominees:
– Petite fille, dir. Sébastien Lifshitz
– Si c’était de l’amour, dir. Patric Chiha
– La casa dell’amore, dir. Luca Ferri

Winner:
Si c’était de l’amour, dir. Patric Chiha

You can read more about the movie on the TEDDY blog and below you can watch our interview with Patric Chiha:

Best SHORT Film

Nominees:
– Extractions, dir. Thirza Cuthand
– Untitled Sequence of Gaps, dir. Vika Kirchenbauer
– Genius Loci, dir. Adrien Merigeau
– Playback. Ensayo de una despedida, dir. Agustina Comedi

Winner:
Playback. Ensayo de una despedida, dir. Agustina Comedi

You can read more about the movie on the TEDDY blog and below you can watch our interview with Agustina Comedi:

Jury Award

Winner:
Rizi, von Tsai Ming-Liang

You can read more about the movie on our blog and watch the trailer here:

Readers’ Award

Winner:
Futur Drei, dir. Faraz Shariat

ACTIVIST Award

Winner:
Welcome to Chechnya, dir. David France

You can read more about the movie on the TEDDY blog and below you can watch our interview with David France:

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees! Thank you for making movies! :)

Queer Academy – A Directors Exchange 2020

Curated by Panorama and organised with the Queer Academy, A Directors Exchange analyses the work of filmmakers whose films are being presented at the festival and are in contention for the TEDDY AWARD.

TIMETABLE

11.30am – 12.30pm: A Directors Exchange on Queering the Framework – In conversation with Patric Chiha and Matthew Rankin

Patric Chiha, director of Si c’était de l’amour, and Matthew Rankin, director of The Twentieth Century, use various styles and artistry in their films to queer the framework where stories told through dance and theatrical staging become celebrations of transformation.  

Patric Chiha & Matthew Rankin

Patric Chiha:
Born in Vienna, Austria in 1975, he studied fashion design in Paris and then film editing at the INSAS film school in Brussels. His short and documentary films have screened at several festivals. His feature film debut Domaine, starring Béatrice Dalle, premiered at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. His documentary Brothers of the Night screened in the 2016 Panorama.

Matthew Rankin:
Born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1980. He studied at the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal, as well as Université Laval in Quebec. In 2011, Rankin participated at Berlinale Talents. Following numerous short films, The Twentieth Century is his first feature film.

Moderation: Ana David

1pm – 2pm: A Directors Exchange on New Queer German Cinema – In conversation with Faraz Shariat and Leonie Krippendorff

Two films with a fresh take on coming of age and coming to terms with ideas of home and belonging in a post-migrant society. Faraz Shariat, director of Futur Drei and Leonie Krippendorff, director of Kokon, talk about their motivations, inspirations and desires for creating their own stories. 

Faraz Shariat & Leonie Krippendorff

Faraz Shariat:
Born in Cologne, Germany in 1994, he worked first as a director and actor at Schauspiel Köln and on video installations for the Staatstheater Hannover before studying dramatic arts at the University of Hildesheim. His work focuses on post-migrant experiences and stories about immigrant families. His debut feature film, Futur Drei, evolved from his autobiographical documentaries exploring his family history and from his work as a translator for refugees. The film was developed in collaboration with Paulina Lorenz and Raquel Molt in the Jünglinge film collective, where the three have been working together ever since they met at university.

Leonie Krippendorff:
Born in Berlin, Germany in 1985, she studied directing at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf from 2009 to 2016. Her graduation film, Looping, was nominated for numerous national and international prizes and won several. The screenplay for her debut feature film, Kokon, was selected for the 2018 Berlinale Talents Script Station. She is currently working on the screenplays for two new feature film projects. Variety chose her as one of “10 Europeans to Watch 2020.”

Moderation: Nastaran Tajeri-Foumani 


Free admission / The events are held in English.