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
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.
The third festival day is buzzing with lively events and especially with our delightful premieres – 9 taking place only today! We’ve comprised a list of all the premieres and reruns scheduled for today to make your life easier. Check them out below👇
As if that wasn’t eventful enough, keep an eye out for our TEDDY Talk: The TEDDY Winners Path through a Pandemic. The event will be broadcasted live at 4 PM (CET) at teddyaward.tv/live.
Synopsis: The camera hovers, lost in reverie as voices and sounds waft through the gutted rooms of a building. Archive footage is sometimes projected onto unplastered walls and at others used as a soundtrack as we continue our tour. This is the legendary Chelsea Hotel, famous as the preferred abode of New York’s bohemia from the 1950s to the 1980s. Here, bourgeois society’s misfits – sex workers, poets, queers and artists – were able to find cheap accommodation and form alliances. In this documentary, the remaining tenants from that era grant access to their flats and give us an insight into their lives. They are the focus of a film that interweaves the present with the ghosts of the past. The completion of eight years of luxury refurbishment ahead of the building’s reopening as a hotel is eagerly awaited by some residents and dreaded by others.
Synopsis: James Gregory Atkinson’s performative short film centers the history of the iconic Peacock Chair to interrogate contemporary social contexts and historical concepts of identities. The film engages the chair’s origins in forced prison labor in the Philippines, its status as an internationally traded “exotic” commodity, its use in portrait photography, and its associations with Black radical activists such as Huey P. Newton—to explore ideas of Black masculinities and resistance.
Synopsis: A remote lake in the North American landscape. The sand is yellow, the sky is blue and the mountains distant; there is nary a tree far and wide to provide shade. Faye is spending her days here in a trailer, with two books and a radio, leisurely birdwatching and stargazing. With her wiry build, wild blonde hair and hands that speak of a life of labour, she fits in perfectly here. Anything that breaks, she simply fixes; the only time she sits up and takes notice is when there is a knock at the door. Because Faye is waiting for Lito. Their connection goes way back to their youthful love for each other, but for some years now they have also shared the pain of loss – both are widowed. Max Walker-Silverman’s gentle, laconic film is about contemplative introspection, the power of love and the depths of melancholy. Dale Dickey’s portrayal of Faye is a touching mixture of inner strength and fragility, which is also reflected in the impressive natural scenery and a delicate soundtrack.
Synopsis: Four friends – Nic, Leo, Andrea and Raff – tell the stories of their gender transitions. Looking back on their childhood and youth, they share their personal memories and experiences. Even if they did not always conform to the social norms of femininity – all four were socialised as girls. Each of their gender biographies may be different, yet there are parallels. This helps them to understand each other and feel less alone. The discussions with partners, the choice of pronouns, the hormone therapy, decisions about surgery and dealing with the authorities – the processes are diverse, and lengthy. In the strictly binary world we live in, the decision to determine one’s own gender identity is a subversive act.
Synopsis: In his dreams, bathed in a brilliant glow, Manu and his best friend Felipe are inching closer and closer together, yet they never kiss. A confusing desire, as Manu is dating Azul, and the two are about to have sex for the first time. In Mariano Biasin’s Sublime, a niggling desire simmers beneath the surface of 16-year-old Manu’s everyday life, his emotional turmoil bubbling up and revealing itself in indirect ways – during his attempt to find the right chords for his latest lyrics and in his flights of melancholic introspection, at band practices with the rest of the guys or during supper with his parents. Cautiously, with increasing resignation, Manu keeps trying to solve the conundrum: how do you avoid losing something precious, when it’s the very thing tearing you up inside?
Synopsis: While their classmates endure the visit to the concert with pranks, Pietro and Tommaso secretly get closer to each other in the box. During the playing of Vivaldi’s composition, their lips touch. When Tommaso invites Pietro to his home shortly afterwards, the tension is still in the air. The desire, however, soon gives way to an ambiguity that particularly irritates the otherwise cautious Pietro. What did the kiss mean?
Synopsis: A city at dawn. Traffic is flowing like red and white blood cells. A man sleeps, enveloped in the darkness – he is beautiful, he is naked, it is hot. We will never know what he is dreaming. The sun rises and the façades of the skyscrapers begin to sparkle
Synopsis: In the shadow of a colonial past and a neo-capitalist present, Inti, Jai and Pauline are searching for their place in a world that was not made for them. As they roam the neighbourhood looking for somewhere to settle, they question their parents about faith, spirituality, roots and their experiences of migration. They decide to occupy an empty bank building in order to fill it with their memories, dreams and role play. A portrait of our time that oscillates between documentary, performance art and surrealism.
Synopsis: A Hollywood villa on a sultry summer night. The escort does what he was hired to do and gives his client the illusion he has paid for. “I’ll make you a star”, the customer says, before the tide turns abruptly and the power dynamics are unsettled. A revenge movie of the queer kind.
