We’re excited to have four fantastic DJs on board who will provide the best sound for the big TEDDY Party at Berlin’s Volksbühne.
Pat Bernetti started her career in NYC and now resides in Berlin, playing in clubs, festivals, awards, galas and events all over the world, where she thrills the party crowds with her mix of RnB, Hip Hop, House, Pop, Funk, Oldies, Rock, Electro Swing & Charts.
DJ Trust.The.Girl is electrifying queer crowds all over Germany with her colorful, vibrant mix of diverse genres.
Amperia is a queer, non binary Berlin-based DJ. Known for their party Golosissima and as resident and curator of Autopoiesis and poly|motion, they will be playing a driving techno house set.
Ābnamā: a can of worms wearing lipstick on the can, a return to the source of all things considered and a flashback to bearings lost but never had. Based in Berlin, co-organizer and resident at DUMP, she is known for driving grooves that span across various genres.
Paris at night. The driving bass of a sound system thunders through an underground car park. On the dance floor of a club, the revellers allow themselves be propelled by techno, enveloped in smoke and light, communicating only with their bodies. Félicie is approached by her ex-girlfriend, but she turns away. In the next room, the music is quieter. People get talking, consume drugs or take a break before throwing themselves into the dancing once more. This is where Félicie meets Saïd who has just come from his shift as a driver and tells her about the “gilets jaunes” protests. Félicie suggests that they move on to party at her place while the other revellers continue to abandon themselves to the night. In clear-eyed close-ups that float amidst an ever-developing soundscape, director Anthony Lapia captures the anatomy and energy of aparty just as well as the gradual transition to the quieter world of the afterparty. On the cusp between night and day, different lives and views collide before, more or less gently but inexorably, everyday life returns.
“He’s not the first boy who’s missing in the forest. The boy that was with him says that a monster has taken him.”
Santiago del Estero, northern Argentina. When Nino is deemed a bad influence to the other boys in his neighbourhood and has toendure homophobic attacks on the streets, his parents temporarily move the family to the countryside. Away from the city, Nino wandersin a forest supposedly haunted by the Almamula, a monster that takes those who commit carnal sins and impure acts. It’s summer: thebodies sweat, the line between dream and reality becomes blurry. A boy disappears. In a world surrounded by whispers, unspokendesires and prayers, Nino’s curiosity and impulses surface. As an escape from a reality flooded with toxicity, repressions, interdictionsand imminent violence, the hidden and sensuous mysteries of the forest become increasingly attractive to Nino.
“We’ll grow up, we’ll make mistakes, and learn from them, we’ll suffer, we’ll laugh out loud, we’ll age, we’ll get sick, we’ll die. In themeantime, dear Felipe Zavala, we must live.”
Felipe has a dream – he is on stage and passionately performing while his mother, grandmother and his deceased father are part of the audience and watch him enthusiastically. After waking up, reality catches up with him again. He’s part of a theatre group with his friends, at night he writes his own plays, but he keeps from his mother that he is taking acting lessons. Because in her reality there is no place for such dreams, and Mara is not fond of talk about theatre. When Felipe is invited to an audition and is confronted with family secrets and deceptions, the lines between dream and reality, truth and lies, dramas and real life become increasing blurred.
Moritz arrives in Berlin with no particular plans. He might study art history, but there is no rush, he is only 22. He has moved here to be with his boyfriend Jonas, an attractive photographer who is a little more accustomed to the easy-going, noncommittal ways of the city. But then their relationship suddenly comes to an end. Devastated and alone, Moritz becomes a seeker. His first foray takes him to a gym. Little by little his fashion, his friends and his drugs start to change. His life becomes more and more nocturnal, and he begins to liveout his repressed desires. With a documentary-like sensibility, Hannes Hirsch’s feature-length debut sensitively depicts a new start in Berlin’s gay scene. Bodyimages and notions of masculinity are constantly being negotiated, sexual constellations and identities are changing, and insecurities are sedated with the intoxicating rush of the next encounter. But Moritz’s vulnerability is always discernible. In this way, Drifter looks beneath the seductive surface of a night culture that knows no bounds and its short-lived games, revealing the actual people rather than celebrating the cliché.
With his performances as Aphrodite Banks, Jules has a place among London’s celebrated drag artists. One night after a show, he steps out to get some cigarettes and is brutally attacked by a guy out with a gang of blokes. Although Jules is able to recover physically, he withdraws from the outside world, traumatised. Months later, he recognises his attacker by chance in a gay sauna. Without make-up and wrapped only in a towel, Jules is able to approach the other man incognito and find out who he is. He begins an affair with the closeted homosexual Preston in order to take his revenge. Directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping deploy a direct style and tightly woven scenes to depict a London of stark contrasts interms of gender ideology. Carried by their cast’s physically and psychologically subtle performances, their revenge drama is gripping, but more importantly it is also the study of a milieu that avoids social determinism. A compelling psychological portrait of internalised homophobia and a powerful and brave pro-LGBTIQ+ kick against a society that, at its core, is totalitarian, anti-gay and anti-trans.
They meet at the airport in Seoul and could not be more different: Chinese immigrant Jin Xia works at the security checkpoint, dresses practically, and does her duty. The green-haired woman who shows up that day is younger, more extroverted and unimpressed by the pat-down. Xia is fascinated. When the young woman involves her in her crooked dealings shortly afterwards, it becomes clear that the two have more in common than meets the eye. On the lookout for the big hit that could free them from all their dependencies, they venture into South Korea’s underworld where they hold their own against the men who seek to dominate, possess and use them. In her second feature-length film, Han Shuai brings together two disparate lone female fighters who have learned to rely on no one but themselves. As they enter into a reluctant dance of getting-to-know each other – sometimes attracting, at other times repelling, sometimes drawing closer, at other times turning away – their plan recedes into the background. The cocoon that is spun around the twoof them and binds them together as they race through the city at night on their mopeds seems fragile, but inevitable.
Ralphie is young and healthy and his girlfriend is pregnant. Yet things do not feel quite right. His job as an Uber driver is neither gratifying nor financially secure. His relationship with his body may also be built on shaky foundations. When he is inducted into a libertarian masculinity cult, the tensions that have been growing inside him surface. Ralphie begins to lose his grip on reality. In his previous film, The Wound, South African filmmaker John Trengove explored how a male rite of passage unleashed repressed feelings with the same potential for danger as opening a pressure cooker. A similar force is at work inside the protagonist of Manodrome, in whom Trengove observes a disturbing phenomenon from an original angle. Ralphie is not the stereotype that springs to mind when thinking of groups formed around fervent misogyny such as the infamous “incels”, and his character helps us to deepen our understanding of what male fragility can entail. In spite of the dark implications of its premise, this film is not devoid of humour. However, the skilful way in which the tension builds and powerful performances from Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody leave the viewer truly shaken.
Film still Maynila: Sa mga kuko ng liwanag | Manila in the Claws of Light | Manila, Courtesy The Film Foundation / World Cinema Project
Fisherman Julio leaves his idyllic island province to search for his girlfriend Ligaya in Manila, where she allegedly has a job. He signs up at a construction site, where the workers are ruthlessly exploited. One day at the market, he spots the woman who lured Ligaya to the big city. She takes him to the house of a Chinese man, where Julio thinks he recognises his girlfriend at a window. When he loses both his job and his apartment, he ends up with a street hustler, who indoctrinates him into the world of prostitution. It becomes increasingly clear that Ligaya is also working as a prostitute, albeit not voluntarily … This social drama depicts the ordeals of two young people as representatives of the urban underclass during the Marcos regime, whereby the real location is freighted with symbolic meaning. Oppression and state corruption in Manila in the Claws of Light are countered by gestures of solidarity among the poorest of the poor. But neither religious solace nor the Marxist revolution will provide salvation for the two lovers, seen finally in a cinema, hugging as the passion of the Christ in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961) unfolds.
Iman lives with his wife Maryam and his two daughters in Sweden in an ever-changing succession of refugee hostels. Having fled his former Iranian homeland for fear of persecution, he is looking for ways to secure residence for them, and is earning extra money delivering pizzas on a snowmobile. When Maryam unexpectedly falls pregnant with a third child, and conversations with the authorities become more difficult, Iman decides to resume his career as a wrestler. Although he has promised Maryam to put the whole thing behind him, he is hoping that this will help him obtain a special residence permit as a sportsman. His skills quickly return and are appreciated in the Swedish team, but his life away from his family is not without consequences. Communication breaks down between him and his wife, who sees no reason to stay in Sweden any longer, and he is confronted with the deeper reasons for his flight. Iranian director Milad Alami’s second feature depicts an emotional as well as physical confrontation with the unspoken. With an engaging cast led by Payman Maadi, this meticulously rendered drama reveals how complex social dynamics can affect an individual’s inner self.
After transitioning, it seemed easier for Feña to simply cut all ties with his past. Dealing with the changes was painful enough, let alonehis family’s reaction. But when Feña runs into an ex-boyfriend, receives an unexpected visit from his little sister and finds his Chileanfather trying to reconnect with him, their lives are suddenly once again intertwined. Compassionate, intimate and frank, Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s debut feature film explores the complex challenge of being trans and trying to reconcile the past with the present.
In the 1970s, an Iranian student named Zahra meets a fellow student called Maria at university in Bucharest. They are both pursuing a degree in medicine and develop a deep friendship and admiration for each other. When the revolution against the Shah breaks out in 1979, Zahra goes back to Iran, moved by the hope of political transformation, although disappointments are quick to follow. Zahra never ends up returning to Romania. Over the next decades, Zahra and Maria exchange letters about protests, the general upheaval in both countries, the oppression of women and how it affects them; Romania is not to remain untouched by revolution either. Separated by the revolutions, their correspondence depicts two women struggling to conform to societal stereotypes and grappling with their profound feelings for each other, which seem to stretch beyond simple friendship. In his film, Vlad Petri draws entirely on incredible, stunningly edited archival footage from Iran and Romania to tell the story of these two women in such a way that the lines between documentary and fiction blur. In such testing times, doesn’t such a bond almost seem too good to be true?
Bambino has settled into his life as a single man. His delivery driver job in Lagos means that he has a steady income, even if the promised promotion is a long time coming. He is appreciated by the neighbourhood; he helps out financially where he can and is generous when people are late repaying him. His neighbour Ifeyinwa’s advances leave him cold, but when he meets the charismatic Bawa, the two immediately hit it off. A photo competition sees the two men driving around the city together on day-long explorations with increasing frequency. As Bawa looks at him through his camera lens, it soon becomes clear that he sees in Bambino not only a good model but also more than just a friend. Director, screenwriter and producer Babatunde Apalowo takes the title of his film at its word. Using an unobtrusive colour composition, he tells a restrained and tender story of two men who become close in a society in which same-sex sexual relations are considered taboo and are liable for prosecution. Their dance around each other unfolds slowly, in images that are concentrated and filled with calm. A sensual and politically important film from Nigeria about finding love where you least expect it.
Buenos Aires in March 2020, just days before the outbreak of the pandemic. A wedding is being celebrated; a car overturns. The guests share joints, kisses, a blow job and the memory of a loss. At the centre of this comedy of errors is 30-year-old Arturo, played by director Martín Shanly. He is every bit as drawn to misfortune as he is directionless – qualities he shares with the remainder of the film’s characters. His faux pas and blunders stand in inverse relation to the finesse with which the film elegantly glides back in time from the wedding day to the 2010s. As episodes from Arturo’s life come to the fore – a bus trip to Patagonia with his trans housemate, a painfully awkward dress rehearsal for a play – narrative time is compressed and then extended again, all while a voiceover provides a steady counterweight to the tumult. As the hit song “Azúcar amargo” (Bitter sugar) comes on and the dancefloor fills, the bittersweet nature of the film comes across with every bit the same clarity as the coughing that proceeds it – elbow etiquette is still yet to materialise.
A German police state of the past is the setting for the pulsating short film thriller Es gibt keine Angst (Afraid Doesn’t Exist). In it, Anna Zett collages video and audio material from the Berlin Archive of the GDR Opposition, partially taking the perspective of a sensitive child. Based on her own intimate involvement, the artist traces a successful, yet mostly unknown act of resistance at the very end of the GDR, while at the same time opening up an associative space for connecting with experiences of violence that are otherwise difficult to access today. Vocally highly condensed voices from a 1986 East Berlin poetry reading support the voiceless narrator – “an adult child” – in there construction of her own emotional world, as does the multi-layered musical score. From footage of the environmental library to private videos and journalistic material, the film leads to the second occupation of the Stasi headquarters in Berlin-Lichtenberg in September1990, where it settles into a very different mood.
Since her debut at the age of 18, musician, civil rights campaigner and activist Joan Baez has been on stage for over 60 years. For the now 82-year-old, the personal has always been political, and her friendship with Martin Luther King and her pacifism have shaped her commitment. In this biography that opens with her farewell tour, Baez takes stock in an unsparing fashion and confronts sometimes painful memories. She not only shares her successes but also speaks openly about long-standing psychological problems and therapies, about family, drugs, ageing and questions of guilt and forgiveness. She makes it clear that, during her relationship with the very young Bob Dylan, she used her celebrity to launch his career. Her disappointment at her later estrangement from him becomes palpable. Thanks to a long-term friendship with one of the film’s directors, Karen O’Connor, Baez granted the directing trio access to the “inner demons” that have plagued her since youth. Their film interweaves diary entries and a wealth of partly previously unseen archive material with extensive conversations with Baez, as well as backstage moments from the tour. An intimate portrait that will not only be of interest to her fans.
Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” tells the story of a young man who grows up to become a 36-year-old woman. Almost a century after its publication, Paul B. Preciado speaks to Virginia Woolf to tell her that her fictional character has become a reality. The transition of Orlando’s body now lies at the root of all non-binary bodies and there are Orlandos all over the world. Through the authentic voices of other young bodies undergoing metamorphosis, Preciado retraces the stages of his personal transformation through a poetic journey in which life, writing, theory and image merge freely in the search for truth. Every Orlando, he says, is a transgender person who is risking his, her or their life on a daily basis as they find themselves forced to confront government laws, history and psychiatry, as well as traditional notions of the family and the power of multinational pharmaceutical companies. But if “male” and “female” are ultimately political and social fictions, Orlando, ma biographie politique shows us that change is no longer just about gender, but also about poetry, love and skin colour.
The Black gay “Devil’s Queen” (her real name is never mentioned) rules the underworld of Rio de Janeiro from the back room of a brothel. Her eyes thick with green eyeshadow, her gaze falls mercilessly upon the members of her drug cartel. The same jackknife can be used either to shave her legs or to slit open traitors. But her reign of terror is unstable; resistance is brewing. Soon, everyone is waging war against each other to replace the queen: the favela gangsters against the gays, the drag queens against the sex workers. People with few chances in bourgeois life. Fontoura’s garish pulp construction stands for popular Brazilian cinema during the military dictatorship, whereby power relations were exaggerated in nihilistic fashion. Much like in Karim Aïnouz’s Madame Satã (2002), legendary 1930s gangster figure João Francisco dos Santos serves here as an inspiration, who this time is transposed into the 1970s as an early representation of queerness. Milton Gonçalves plays her with various voices, and the dichotomous concept of masculinity – which allows no shades of grey between macho and queen – dissolves here into glitter and air.
SCREENING TIMES:
17.02. / 22:00 Zoo Palast 2
RERUNS:
La Bête dans la jungle (TheBeast in the Jungle) 17.02. / 18:30 Zoo Palast 1
Notre corps (Our Body) 17.02. / 19:00 Delphi Filmpalast
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
