Today’s the big day: the TEDDY AWARDS are being given out at the Volksbühne – and you can join us via live stream!
We’re so excited for tonight’s show, and even though there can’t yet be an audience, we have a wonderful program prepared for you. In spite of all the restrictions, we’re more than happy to be able to set a sign: no virus will keep us from celebrating queer life and queer creativity and solidarity.
There will be live performances by GEORGETTE DEE as well as by RASHA NAHAS. For the first time, BRIX SCHAUMBURG is going to host the TEDDY AWARDS and MICHAEL STÜTZ (Head of Panorama) will join us for a little chat with ZSOMBOR BOBÁK. Last but not least, our fantastic TEDDY JURY will be there to award four brilliant filmmakers for their work.
So open a little bottle of bubbly and join us for the party! 🥳
RERUNS:
Alis 18.02. / 18:00 Titania Palast
Ask, Mark ve Ölüm (Love, Deutschmarks and Death) 18.02. / 14:00 Cubix 9
Today is the start of Berlinale’s “Publikumstag” (Audience Day), which usually only happens on the last Sunday of the festival. This year, there’s four days to catch up on all the movies you haven’t seen yet. 🎞
As always, you can find all the times and cinemas below.
And don’t forget: tomorrow at 9 pm CET you can watch the live ceremony of the TEDDY AWARDS via our livestream. You can find our fabulous lineup here.
RERUNS:
Alis 17.02. / 15:30 Filmtheater am Friedrichshain
Bashtaalak sa’at (Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day?) 17.02. / 21:00 Cubix 7
Tonight’s the big night and the Golden Bears of the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival will be awarded. The TEDDY team is also getting antsy – only two more days until our very own award show, which will be streamed LIVE from Berlin’s Volksbühne on Friday at 9pm CET.
And while you’re getting hyped up for our show, you can still catch some of the movies premiering today. Discover all the times and cinemas below – plus the re-runs! 🎬
Synopsis: Ben plants a tree on the street in front of his house in Neve Sha’anan, a migrant neighbourhood in the south of Tel Aviv. The district is on the up, and Ben has bought and upgraded a flat here together with his partner Raz. This gay couple now enjoys a settled existence, their days are structured by a well-established routine and everything is in its proper place. Time then, to tackle their desire to have children. And so, assiduously and conscientiously, they set about searching for a suitable egg donor and surrogate mother. One day, when a neighbourly conflict escalates over the tree he has planted, Ben becomes witness to brutal police violence against an Eritrean. The incident upsets his self-image and his plans for a life together with Raz.
Synopsis: Diva is a fan letter to Diva Cat Thy, a Vietnamese transwoman, street food vendor, and performer, who openly shares her life and struggles daily on social media. Trying to bridge distances of both geography and language, the French director uses found footage posted online by Diva and her community to get in touch with her. He has never met her, cannot travel to Vietnam due to COVID-19 restrictions, and relies on his boyfriend, an Australian of Vietnamese origins, who helps translate the footage and acts as an intermediary. In a conversation constructed through subtitles and surtitles, the film not only reveals the filmmaker’s adoration for Diva, but also his and his partner’s process of understanding and making meaning of Diva’s life as well as their own in relation to it. Diva’s life, on the streets of Saigon as a transitory street food vendor, online as a social media celebrity, and on stage as a bingo singer and circus performer, is interwoven with the processes of looking at (or watching) her and of translation, as well as with a reflection about queer identity, distance, intimacy, and incoherent histories. Diva is a fleeting moment in a woman’s life, one that promises to reach out to a wider queer and solidarity community, blurring the spheres of the online and the real.
Synopsis: A double exposure, a portrait of a body, a house that oscillates between its narrative past and its literal presence. The melodramatic, 1950s films of amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin are psychically projected onto the house in which my grandmother raised seven kids as it is cleaned out and put up for sale after she passed away. Upholding the narrative structures of melodrama that often center around men, even when the films are about women, the film asks the viewer, as Thurber says in her introduction, to pay attention to the peripheries. (Carl Elsaesser)
Synopsis: “I’m still here!” shouts 19-year-old Neve Kelly at her mother, but she does not react. Neve is horrified to discover that she herself is dead. Realising that people can’t see her, she looks on as friends and family worry why she has not come home after the party last night and form search parties to comb the forest for her. Neve takes care of her battered body, washes the blood off the back of her head and changes her dirty clothes. She has no memory of last night. What on earth happened to her? Determined to find her killer, she starts investigating her own death. She uncovers deeply buried secrets and is forced to re-examine everything about her life and the people she cared about.
Wow, time is flying by – tomorrow night the Berlinale’s Golden Bears are already being awarded! But before that, we have quite a number of fascinating TEDDY movies premiering for you today!
Scroll down to find out about all the films coming out today, and don’t forget to check out the re-runs as well – plenty of fascinating content! 🐻
Synopsis: The German Federal Republic’s 1961 recruitment agreement with Turkey not only brought “guest workers” to Germany but also their music. Cem Kaya’s dense documentary film essay is a tutorial in Turkish-German recent history that tells a tale of assembly line jobs, homesickness and family reunification, the bazaar in the elevated railway station at Berlin’s Bülowstraße, xenophobia and racism, the wistful songs of the early years and the hip-hop of the post-reunification period. These are the stories shared by musicians beginning with Metin Türköz and Yüksel Özkasap, to the psychedelic Derdiyoklar and the chart-topping rapper Muhabbet. Their music has evolved a long way from that of German bands and has always developed out of the Turkish community and its desires. This is the world of Radio Yilmaz, various music cassette labels, protest rocker Cem Karaca’s German exile, and wedding bands that also sing in Kurdish and Arabic to meet the demands of the market. Extensive archival research and an interest in Turkish popular culture are recurring themes in Cem Kaya’s work. With Ak, Mark ve Ölüm, he has created a rhythmic and vividly narrated cinematic encyclopaedia of Turkish music in Germany.
SCREENING TIMES:
15.02. / 16:00 International
15.02. / 16:20 Cubix 2 [Screening for industry professionals | With accreditation only]
Synopsis: Since 2017, #MeToo and the no-longer-covered-up abuse of countless women by Harvey Weinstein have called many things into question in the film industry. This documentary analysis of the male gaze in cinema is based on Nina Menkes’ lecture “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression”. In it, Menkes uncovers patriarchal narrative structures that lie behind supposedly classic set-ups and camera angles. Making use of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s theses on the objectification and sexualisation of the female body, she shows how aesthetic decisions such as camera movement or lighting influence the perception of women on screen, and how shot design functions as an instrument and a mirror of power relations. In doing so, she determines a connection between established film language and a culture of misogyny that leads to the abuse of women beyond the screen. Her individual analyses of scenes from 120 years of film history demystify many a cult film in the independent canon – because the film language that has been shaped by the patriarchy pervades more than just Hollywood cinema.
Synopsis: Fernanda returns to her uncle’s ranch in Goiás in mid-western Brazil after an absence of many years, bringing the ashes of her deceased adoptive mother back home. Her appearance and her search for the truth about her roots shake the façade of her middle- class family. For her landowner uncle, a conservative mayor of the local municipality who is campaigning for re-election, Fernanda’s investigations and accusations are rapidly becoming a threat. But she remains unyielding in her bid for truth and justice.
In her surreal, fantastical debut, Flávia Neves masterfully interweaves the search for one’s own origins with Brazil’s colonial past. At the heart of this family drama is the confrontation with antiquated traditions, exploitative relationships and with those who profit from them. Fogaréu depicts an inspiring attempt to break out of hardened structures as well as the hope for a new beginning.
SCREENING TIMES:
15.02. / 14:00 Cubix 4 [Screening for industry professionals | With accreditation only]
Synopsis: If from Every Tongue It Drips is a hybrid documentary film that uses the framework of quantum physics to explore the ways that personal relationships and political movements at once transcend and challenge time, space, identity, and location. The film follows the lives of a couple living in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka; Ponni writes Rekhti, a form of 19th-century, Urdu, queer poetry; the other, Sarala, is the camera operator. As their personal lives unfold on camera, the lines between rehearsal and reality, location and distance, self and other dissipate and reinforce one another. Simultaneously, through the poet and the camera operator’s daily lives, interconnections between British colonialism, Indian nationalism, and the impact of both on contemporary poetry, dance, and music in South Asia are revealed.
Synopsis: In a home in Columbia, ten young women take a seat, one after another, and close their eyes. They are asked to picture Alis, an imaginary friend, and to bring her story to life in a creative dialogue with the filmmakers. Like the interviewees, Alis used to live on the streets of Bogotá. This imaginary companion is the seed for an extraordinary documentary format, serving as a reflective and delicate point of entry to the protagonists’ own stories. Alis becomes a surface for the projection of past traumas, or the travails of companions who fell by the wayside, and also for life visions and desires for the future. The imaginary friend is a blank slate for exploring individual ideas of freedom, as well as battles that have yet to be fought.
Synopsis: A small film crew ventures into the compartments of Mumbai’s local trains that are reserved for women. “What makes you angry?” is the simple question the filmmaker poses to the train’s female passengers. Acquaintances and women who are encountering each other by chance are invited to reveal their opinions and stories in a space that is public, yet protected. Their answers and observations are manifold: sometimes funny, sometimes depressing, sometimes combative, sometimes resigned, but always honest, they come together to form an increasingly complex tapestry.
Synopsis: Star, a suicidal teen now too old for foster care, develops a candid rapport with An, a student from Shanghai who is assigned to watch her while she is in hospital. A nightly exchange of secrets, text messages and possessions quickly expands the boundaries of their relationship, altering their inner chemistry.
SCREENING TIMES:
15.02. / 18:00 CinemaxX 7
15.02. / 18:35 Cubix 2 [Screening for industry professionals | With accreditation only]
RERUNS:
Le variabili dipendenti (The Dependent Variables) 15.02. / 12:30 Filmtheater am Friedrichshain
Synopsis: Summer days in the quiet suburb are warm and shimmering. Still, between images of parties and intimate moments with his girlfriend, trans-teenager Noah is repeatedly plagued by flashbacks that arrive out of the blue. Though all is calm around him, the sound of the river is overwhelming inside his head. Noah’s best friend died in a sporting accident. The departed’s presence is still palpable, haunting what were supposed to be care-free days.
Synopsis: His T-shirt caked with mortar, Alex takes a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. The other apprentices are laughing, throwing punches and showing off their fighting moves. They try to draw him into their game, but his thoughts seem elsewhere – not even his girlfriend can get through to him. Alex is searching for answers and he withdraws from the expectations of those around him. He eventually finds himself, at ease among a group of complete strangers.
Synopsis: During the 2020 lockdown, Lucrecia Martel returns to her home in Salta, Argentina’s most conservative region. Here she follows Julieta Laso who, like a muse, introduces her to a group of female artists and defiant people who exchange glances and opinions around a fire. Perfectly attuned to a body of work that constructs stories from an amalgam of people and places and, four years after the beautiful Zama, Terminal Norte marks the return to the screen of Argentina’s greatest filmmaker. The result is a gripping tribute to a community that, temporary though it may be, serves as a magnificent antidote to the pandemic.
Synopsis: Dale is used to everybody wanting something from him. As a drug dealer in small-town West Virginia, it kind of goes with the territory. Nelly remains unimpressed, even when he does a little business on the side during their first date. The high school student exerts fascination on Dale. He can talk to her – about dreams, regrets and the fact that maybe it’s not so cool after all when your own life has become a rap anthem.
Synopsis: Transfixed, she follows the movements of a group of dancers rehearsing a routine. Watching two girls kiss, she longingly bites her lower lip – yet in the mirror, she studies her own reflection with disapproval. As feelings of desire vie with insecurity and dejection, the film reveals its 16-year-old protagonist’s emotions mainly through glances and facial expressions – her most explicit utterance being the one written on her forearm: TAKE ME DEMONS.
Synopsis: Set in the backdrop of the nationwide 2019–2020 student protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India—filmed in the city of Bangalore—Sab changa si is an intimate documentary on friendships, language, love, youth, resistance, and identity of class, caste, religion, and gender. In this film, the political is personal.
Synopsis: São Paulo, in a dystopian future not so very far from the present. A virus is circulating, one that mainly attacks the brain and the ability to remember. A state that has forgotten a past marked by colonialism and dictatorship desperately awaits some indeterminate “Golden Phase.” Three young queer people drift through a city bled dry by the pandemic and rampant capitalism, remembering each another’s late lovers, sharing their experiences with HIV, getting makeup tips for masked faces and ultimately coming together with others forgotten by society for an antique revue in the salon of a singer named Mirta. In Gustavo Vinagre’s affable, surrealist survey of a politically imposed amnesia, a queer era has dawned in which memories can only survive because they are shared collectively and passed on through affective relationships. Those who spread out in all directions do not collide. And those entirely unconcerned with dying rich and privileged are experiencing the Golden Phase right now. In Três tigres tristes, the margins of society glitter, forgotten by the pandemic.
Synopsis: It’s Friday night and just like every other week, best friends Rönkkö and Mimmi are busy beating back the darkness of the Finnish winter with an irrepressible lust for life and love. With her quirky wit, Rönkkö stands out at every party and has no trouble getting the boys’ attention – yet how do you turn desire into fulfilment? When Mimmi loses her temper, you might find yourself on the wrong end of her hockey stick. But when she falls in love with the graceful figure skater Emma, everything suddenly seems bright and easy. With its episodic narrative, Alli Haapasalo’s film tells a story of friendship, and of three exhilaratingly headstrong individuals trying to wrest dreams from reality and redefining relationships and sexuality along the way.
SCREENING TIMES:
14.02. / 20:00 Urania
RERUNS:
Bashtaalak sa’at (Shall I compare you to a summer’s day?) 14.02. / 14:35 Cubix 3 (Screening for industry professionals | With accreditation only)
