Blog, Jury 2018, TEDDY

The TEDDY Jury 2018

February 2, 2018 tma

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

TEDDY AWARD Jury Member 2018, Roisin-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.

Blog, Teddy 2017

TEDDY goes Oscars

January 24, 2018 beate

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!

Interview with Yance Ford about Strong Island

Interview with Sebastián Lelio, Daniela Vega and Francisco Reyes

Blog

TEDDY Trailer 2018

January 20, 2018 beate

Enjoy the trailer of 32. TEDDY AWARD created by Marion Habringer.

32. TEDDY AWARD Ceremony
23. Februar 2018 @ Haus der Berliner Festspiele
TICKET HOTLINE 030-4799 7474

TEDDY artwork by cabine

Blog

TEDDY Readers’ Award powered by Mannschaft Magazin

January 16, 2018 naomi

As proud media partner of the Teddy Award, Mannschaft will award the “TEDDY Readers’ Award” 2018. These five film freaks will decide.

For over 30 years, the “Teddy Award” has honored queer films within the framework of the Berlinale. In 2018, Mannschaft Magazin will participate for the first time as media partner and present the “Teddy Readers’ Award”. Until the 15th of December, queer film fans could apply to be members of the jury. Mannschaft received a large pile of dossiers, which did not make the selection easy! Finally, they opted for a composition that unifies different aspects of filmmaking and queer interests, as diverse as possible. The Teddy will be awarded on February 23rd at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The 68th Berlin International Film Festival will take place from February 15 – 25, 2018 – teddyaward.tv

Martin Busse, 30

Born in Berlin, Busse is a music editor for Mannschaft, but also passionately interested in queer filmmaking. As a child, he wanted to be a director; today Martin owns no less than 600 DVDs, from Arthaus to Trash. As jury president and official representative of Mannschaft, Martin will lead the jury.

Katayun Pirdawari, 54

Katayun can be found at the Berlinale almost every year and brings along a lot of experience: she has already participated in the readers’ jury for Siegessäule and Männer Magazin. For almost thirty years, the 54-year-old with Persian background has stood up for LGBT rights and for lesbian Iranian women, including four years as a board member of the Lesbian and Gay Association LSVD. Because of the AfD, Trump, Erdogan and Putin, Katayun is particularly curious about this year’s Berlinale films.

Holger Beisitzer, 42

Holger is a regular moviegoer and once shot a “very short short film” for a competition, as he says. As a gay dad, the artist and interior designer contributes the perspective of a rainbow family.

Christine Burkart, 35

Christine is a freelance video journalist, photographer and museum pedagogue and has long been passionate about queer topics. She describes herself as openly bisexual, even if labels almost always seem too one-dimensional to her. During her studies, she dealt with art history, gender theory and film studies issues – knowledge she will gladly draw on as a juror.

Adriell Kopp, 30

For Adriell, the presence of queer film characters as well as the filming of their destinies is an essential part of finding the identity of the LGBT community. A big fan of queer cinema and a student of media studies, the 30-year-old has a well-trained eye for media aesthetics, queer art and identity politics.

Translation by Naomi Scherer

Blog, TEDDY

Expanding the ‘Me’ in ‘Me Too’

January 8, 2018 Hannah Congdon

Where are the voices of LGBT+ survivors?

The growing number of voices speaking out against sexual assault in the film and entertainment industry mark a seismic shift in cultural attitudes towards sexual violence. Finally we are seeing accusations of sexual assault treated with the severity that should have been the norm decades before; with recurrent perpetrators like Harvey Weinstein and James Toback being removed from their thrones of abuse we might consider much of the hard work already done. But the reality is that for every voice speaking out, there’s another still silenced by the pressures of stigma, fear and shame. Among those many muted victims are members of the queer and gay community, upon whom the weight of social stigmatisation can fall heaviest.

Of the survivors who have been empowered to speak out, the vast majority are cis-het women, alongside several cis-het men (Terry Crews, James Van Der Beck). And yet, Anthony Rapp, the victim of Kevin Spacey’s unwanted sexual advances at the raw age of 14, is one of a notably small chorus of queer and trans voices confident enough to articulate similar experiences of assault as their cisgendered counterparts. Statistically transgender people are at greater risk of sexual violence than cis women[1], bisexual men and women experience assault more regularly than their straight compatriots, lesbians are almost 10% more likely to experience rape than straight women, and gay men face double the risk of sexual violence than heterosexual men[2]. It would be fair to assume that these figures will also be reflected in the sexual crimes of the film and entertainment industry. Why is it, then, that so few of the LGBTQ community feel empowered to speak up alongside their cis-het colleagues?

According to Andria Wilson, executive director of Toronto and Ottawa’s Inside Out Film Festival, “As LGBTQ people, we face additional barriers and oppressions…So in many ways that means these kind of offences are more common and less frequently reported.”[3] Included in those barriers is the double-pressure that queer and trans people might face in “coming out” simultaneously about their sexuality and about their experiences of sexual violence. Not only does that add to the difficulty of vocalising the abuse they’ve endured, it can also conflate those two experiences under the same feeling of trauma in a kind of reverse-effect of Spacey’s dual “confession”. On top of this issue is the perception of homosexuality and transgenderism as sexual deviances among certain societies, meaning, according to trans activist Ashlee Marie Preston, cisgender, white accusers “are a bit more protected by respectability politics than trans women of colour”[4].

Subtler still is the way in which the vocabulary used to delineate sexual violence excludes members of the queer and trans community. Typically, sexual assault is figured in terms of male aggression on women, whilst ‘rape’ specifically denotes sexual penetration. Such language leaves blanks when it comes to expressing, for example, instances of women-on-women violence. When we consider that it was only 2016 when Germany changed its rape laws so that victims of rape need not give evidence of self-defence[5] it’s hardly surprising if there’s a lack of trust in the legal and societal framework supposedly supporting survivors.

The gaps in that support network extend to the world of social media: whilst it is hugely encouraging to see so many women brave enough to participate in the “Me Too” campaign, it is also essential to recognise the narrowness of the vocabulary used to ignite the hashtag. The instruction for “women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted” to write a “Me Too” status erases the possibility that sexual assault might be something more complex than male-on-female sexual aggression. As the statistics referred to earlier suggest, trans and queer people face a heightened risk of sexual violence, and it is therefore vital that we are equipped with the legal, linguistic and societal support to match that risk. Without that, any claims to definitive progress feel blinkered by a heteronormative notion of what constitutes sexual violence, and who has the right to the “Me” in “Me Too”.

[1] https://sapac.umich.edu/files/sapac/SV%20Against%20Trans%20People_1_0.pdf

[2] http://www.transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS%20Full%20Report%20-%20FINAL%201.6.17.pdf

[3] http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/spacey-lgbt-react-power-vulnerable-1.4381878

[4] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qv34wb/we-bring-it-on-ourselves-the-myths-silencing-lgbtq-sexual-assault-victims

[5] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36726095