From 2025, the Winners of Three Berlinale Awards Qualify for the Oscars®
From next year, the winner of the TEDDY AWARD – BEST DOCUMENTARY/ESSAY FILM will also be entitled to enter the competition for an Oscar®. This is the third award presented at the Berlinale to qualify the winning film to be submitted for the Academy Award®/Oscar® longlist alongside the Golden Bear for Best Short Film and the Berlinale Documentary Award.
The TEDDY AWARD, the first queer prize at an A festival, has been presented during the Berlinale since 1987. It is awarded in different categories to films from all sections that address LGBTQIA* topics as part of a broader social context and thus contribute to greater tolerance, acceptance, solidarity and equality in society.
The Golden Bear for Best Short Film has been awarded since 1956 to works that create new focal points in the cinema landscape. A three-person jury selects the winner from around 20 films in the competition.
With the Berlinale Documentary Award, the festival has been emphasising its strong commitment to the documentary form since 2017. Each year, a total of 18 productions compete for the prize.
Feature-length films can be submitted for the 75th Berlin International Film Festival until October 30 and short films until November 13, 2024.
Today there won’t be any new film premiers, but don’t worry! All of your new favourite movies will have several reruns and will be screened today in Berlins most beautiful cinemas :)
Dear queer independent film lovers, today there is is another packed program waiting for you. Additionally there are various film premieres of up-and-coming international hits. Otherwise we as always have a list of reruns of films that already premiered below.
We wish you a lively and queer cinema experience today, tomorrow and for the rest of the Berlinale!
INTERVIEWS:
Fin (Huling Palabas)
In the summer of 2001, 16-year-old Andoy searches for his long-lost father in the most unlikely of places: on VHS tapes. When two movie-like characters appear in his small hometown, his reality begins to falter.
Fourteen-year-old Elias increasingly feels like an outsider in his village. When he meets Alexander, his new neighbour of the same age, Elias is confronted with his burgeoning sexuality.
Two tales of migration, memories and ghosts. After a disaster floods her land, Joana moves to São Paulo and tries to restart her life. Following the death of her father, Flavia moves to his farm in the country with her wife Mara.
Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show – a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the TV, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.
Buenos Aires, 2019. Lucrecia, who works as a museum security guard, foresees a sharp rise in the dollar’s value with her pendulum and falls in love with the employee of a currency exchange office.
Created from archival materials from communist Poland, the film tells the story of a multispecies matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems.
West Berlin, 1979. Jürgen Baldiga, son of a miner from Essen, has just arrived in the city and decides to become an artist. Working as a rent boy and cook, he writes poems and a diary. After learning that he has HIV in 1984, he discovers photography. He intends his images to stop time and capture reality. They reveal his friends and lovers, wild sex, life on the street and the camp queens from the SchwuZ gay club who become his adopted family. Oscillating between despair and desire, rebellion and the will to survive, Baldiga becomes a chronicler of the queer West Berlin subculture in the face of his own imminent demise. When he died at the age of 34 in 1993, he left behind thousands of photographs and forty diaries – a unique artistic legacy. Using poetic diary excerpts, stark images and memories from companions, Baldiga – Entsichertes Herz depicts not only a ground breaking photographer but also an AIDS activist and committed fighter against the stigmatisation of gay people’s lives.
Filmed during the “Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour” in 2022, this documentary seamlessly weaves together exclusive archival gems with dynamic tour footage to capture the transformative journey of Canadian Merrill Nisker into the internationally acclaimed cultural powerhouse that is Peaches. From the inception of the stage show to the rigorous rehearsals and riveting performances, the film provides an intimate look at the inner workings of the tour. As a feminist musician, producer, director and performance artist, Peaches has spent over two decades challenging gender expectations, solidifying her status alongside pop and music industry icons. Her fearless originality has called social norms into question, dismantled stereotypes and confronted patriarchal power structures. Through biting wit, she advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights and tackles issues of sexual and gender and identity, leaving an indelible mark on popular culture.
While their parents are away, eight-year-old Rafaela stays at home in the care of her 15-year-old sister, Laura. When Laura decides to go visit a boy she likes, Rafaela has to tag along. But then Laura and the boy lock themselves in his room. Rafaela waits, gets bored and finally begins to explore the house. She has a unique encounter with Uli, a queer young woman, and her pet. A film about the feeling of strangeness and the possibility of finding freedom in an unfamiliar place.
Tú me abrasas is an adaptation of “Sea Foam”, a chapter from Cesare Pavese’s “Dialoghi con Leucò” published in 1947. The ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis meet beside the sea and have a conversation about love and death. Sappho is said to have thrown herself into the ocean from lovesickness. Britomartis apparently tumbled off a cliff and into the water while fleeing from a man. Together, the two discuss the stories and images that have emerged around them to try and understand, at least for a moment, the bittersweet nature of desire. The film adapts not only the text but also footnotes and gaps in the story. For example, the fact that, in 1950, a desperate Pavese committed suicide in a hotel room with this book by his side. Or that Sappho’s poems have survived only in fragments. Or that sea foam is historically and scientifically associated with fertility and bacteria, that is, with life itself. “Everything dies in the sea and comes back to life”, says Britomartis. Tú me abrasas introduces new readings and translations that go beyond the myths by Pavese and Sappho.
