\nThe Taste of Betel Nut<\/p>\n
Hong Kong, China 2017
\n84′
\nDirector: Hu Jia<\/p>\n
Li Qi is working for a dolphin show, his friend Ren Yu chugs along with his mobile karaoke, working the surfers\u2019 beach along the coast of Hainan Island where they both live. The tourists are delighted by Ren\u2019s physical similarity to the screen actor Leslie Cheung and are happy to pay for a photo with him \u2013 or to get drunk with him. When a young woman joins this polyamorous couple, things are no different at first and an open, three-way relationship would seem possible. Together, Li Qi, Ren Yu and Bai Ling set out to test the limitations of a restrictive society as well as their own sexuality. But then, something happens that rocks the protagonists to the core and will have a deep and lasting effect on them … Director Hu Jia portrays a generation that would appear to move casually between tradition and a courageously alternative way of life. The film\u2019s unusual setting is compelling from the word go. Largely without dialogue, this drama instead relies on small gestures that are full of meaning. The film\u2019s quietly explicit images tell a tale of love, sex, trust and brutality \u2013 providing a picture of everyday life in China that is seldom seen on the big screen.<\/p>\n
15.02. \/ 20:15 Cubix 8<\/span><\/p>\n Bones of Contention<\/strong><\/span> USA 2017 There are 120,000 victims of Franco\u2019s regime buried in the unmarked mass graves that stretch for kilometres alongside Spain\u2019s country roads. One of these victims is the world renowned Spanish author Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca, who was shot and killed by the fascists during the early days of the Spanish Civil War. The mystery that surrounds the exact location of his remains has made him a symbol for those seeking to remember and disclose the hidden stories of gays and lesbians under Franco, people who continued to be subjected to violent repression long after the end of the dictatorship. Spain is today one of the most progressive countries when it comes to homosexuality, and yet the nation still refuses to account comprehensively for its dark past before a court of law. Andrea Weiss\u2019 sensitive film gives a voice to the victims from the LGBTIQ* community. Her documentary tells their stories and their struggle for clarification, justice and human rights as well as their continued efforts to provide those who were murdered and \u2018disappeared\u2019 with a dignified burial. Impressive archive material documents this repressed history which finds a painful echo in Lorca\u2019s poetry and music<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 17:00 CineStar 7<\/span><\/p>\n Call me by your Name<\/u><\/b><\/span> Italy\/France 2017 It\u2019s the hot, sun-drenched summer of 1983 and Elio is at his parents\u2019 country seat in northern Italy. The seventeen-year-old idles away the time listening to music, reading books and swimming until one day his father\u2019s new American assistant arrives at their large villa. Oliver is charming and, like Elio, has Jewish roots; he is also young, self-confident and good looking. At first Elio is somewhat cold and distant towards the young man but before long the two begin going out together on excursions. Elio begins to make tentative overtures towards Oliver that become increasingly intimate \u2013 even if, as Oliver says, \u2018one can\u2019t talk about such things\u2019. As the short summer progresses, the pair\u2019s mutual attraction grows more intense. Director Luca Guadagnino co-wrote the screenplay \u2013 which is based on the novel of the same name by Andr\u00e9 Aciman \u2013 with US director James Ivory and Walter Fasano. Guadagnino transposes the memories of the book\u2019s first-person narrator Elio into quietly atmospheric images. Besides the two main characters of this unexpected coming-out story (played by Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet and Armie Hammer) the film also boasts a third leading role in the shape of the seductive landscape.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 17:00 Cubix 9<\/span><\/p>\n Cuateros<\/strong><\/span> Argentina 2016 Albertina Carri wants to make a film about Isidro Vel\u00e1zquez, an almost mythical outlaw figure from northern Argentina who was shot dead by police in 1967. She\u2019s not the only one interested in him: her sociologist father Roberto Carri wrote a book on him called \u201cPreRevolutionary Forms of Violence\u201d and a film was made about his story, although both father and film disappeared during the Dirty War. Legends, families, political alignments, cinema: none offer a stable foothold and Carri\u2019s passage through them is like wandering a garden of forking paths, only to arrive at a landscape of cracked earth and thorns. Carri\u2019s narration is anyway not what it might once have been, a mother doesn\u2019t tell things the same way as a daughter. Legends, families, political alignments, cinema: each produces images and these are what appear on the screen, in one channel, three channels, five. It\u2019s all material plucked from an archive and a wonderfully eccentric one at that: news reels, ads, home videos, interviews, movies, abstract forms. Images that could stem from old films, lost films, new films, possible films, impossible films; this is a film for which no other images will do<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 14:00 Akademie der K\u00fcnste<\/span><\/p>\n Discreet<\/strong><\/span><\/span> USA 2017 Bacon sizzling in fat, a young woman thanking the subscribers of her YouTube channel, a corpse neatly wrapped up in black garbage bags and floating down a river \u2013 as clear as the first few images of Travis Mathews\u2019 mystery thriller may be, the connections only become clearer gradually, as if they were emerging from the subconscious. This elliptically edited story, which revolves around a man who can no longer be described as young, is accompanied by an eerie soundscape. Filmmaker Alex lives in a van. He sets up his camera in rural areas in the US and in the no-man\u2019s land near highways. During a visit to his alcoholic mother one day she shares with him a well-kept secret. There is also a small boy, with whom Alex develops an unexpectedly close relationship. Director Mathews chronicles a modern day gay existence in the West \u2013 from anonymous sex to heterosexual porn in a sex bar cabin, or as a service in a motel room. A small house and a life on the margins of society. Meanwhile, on the radio, we are treated to a steady stream of rightwing slogans against everything that is not white and heterosexual, here in Texas.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 20:00 International<\/span><\/p>\n EMO the Musical<\/strong><\/span><\/span> Australia 2016 \u2018How do we know you\u00b4re for real?\u2019 \u00b7 \u2018I tried to hang myself at my last school and they expelled me.\u2019 \u00b7 \u2018Welcome to the band.\u2019 After receiving a Special Mention for Best Short Film from the Generation Youth Jury in 2014, this love story full of irony and exhilaration has now been given the feature-film treatment. Ethan, a sensitive and depressed Emo boy with suicidal tendencies, plays hard doom and gloom rock with the likeminded, in a band where good moods are strictly taboo. Ever chipper classmate Trinity for her part prefers to use her sweet voice to sing praises to the Lord in her Christian youth group. Trinity and Ethan, nobody will ever understand this unlikely match, let alone accept it! And yet that’s exactly what came to pass when their two paths crossed for the first time. The impossible bond they share sets a number of events in motion at their crazy little school.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 14:00 CinemaxX 3<\/span><\/p>\n Fluid\u00f8<\/span><\/span><\/strong> Germany 2017 It is the year 2060 and AIDS has been eradicated. However, in some, the HIV virus has now mutated into a gene from which a drug can be produced that has become the white powder of the twenty-first century. A virtual scanning system enables the secret police to identify anyone who carries this gene. Meanwhile, elsewhere, young men are hooked up to a system of cables and ordered to produce sperm for the production of pharmaceuticals that will dominate the market. Filmed in Berlin, Taiwan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang\u2019s science fiction dystopia revolves around a struggle to gain control over the production and exploitation of bodily fluids. Her film is like an orgiastic opera; a breathless round of bodies, secretions, performances and sexual acts often performed in the service of an overriding economy. An unusual, largely experimental and deliberately parapornographic drama in which the borders between the sexes as well as homo-, hetero, bi, trans- or intersexual are constantly blurred.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 20:15 CineStar 3<\/span><\/p>\n God’s Own Country<\/strong><\/span><\/span> Great Britain 2017 Young Johnny is running his ailing father\u2019s farm in Yorkshire, England. The communication between father and son reflects their adverse living and working conditions, the father\u2019s utterances mostly being restricted to terse criticism of his son. Johnny\u2019s grandmother plays her part stoically. A frustrated Johnny endures his strenuous daily routine. In a bid to escape the harsh daily grind, he has nostrings sex with men, or gets drunk at the local pub. In the spring, a farm hand is taken on for the season. Romanian Gheorghe is the same age as Johnny, who at first eyes him with suspicion. The initial tension between the two men soon gives way to an intense relationship. This opens up completely new prospects but also presents new challenges for Johnny. In his feature-length debut, Francis Lee finds authentic images to depict farm life as one of privation. His film concentrates on the looks and gestures of his characters and their physical proximity. The archaic landscape of \u2018God\u2019s own country\u2019 as the locals call their county, perfectly reflects the turmoil going on inside the protagonists.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 22:45 CineStar 3<\/span><\/p>\n I Am Not Your Negro<\/span><\/span><\/strong> France\/USA\/Belgium\/Switzerland 2016 In June 1979 renowned US writer James Baldwin began work on his last, unfinished text \u2018Remember this House\u2019. His personal memories of his three murdered civil rights friends Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King and his reflections on his own painful experiences as a black American serve to re-write American history. Raoul Peck has turned these thirty hitherto unpublished pages into a powerful collage of archive photographs, excerpts from films and newsreel footage: the boycotts and the resistance against racial segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, the invisibility of black Americans in Hollywood\u2019s legendary works, the AfroAmerican protests against white police brutality that continue to take place even today, Baldwin\u2019s complex relationship with the Black Power Movement and one FBI report\u2019s paranoid view of Baldwin\u2019s homosexuality. A trenchant and disturbing essay about the reality of the lives of African Americans \u2013 lives that are still largely ignored by America\u2019s mainstream. Samuel L Jackson\u2019s voice lends Baldwin\u2019s language suitably poetic, meditative expression.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 17:00 International<\/span><\/p>\n Die Jungfrauenmaschine<\/span><\/span><\/strong> Germany 1988 Young Hamburg journalist Dorothee M\u00fcller is fed up of her persistent lover, Heinz. A complete ing\u00e9nue, she innocently embarks upon an exploration of romantic love \u2013 is it merely a \u2018woman\u2019s malady\u2019? The places where she undertakes this research include a pleasureaddicted hormone researcher\u2019s practice and the monkey house at the zoo. Unable to find any satisfactory answers, Dorothee decides to leave Europe and head for California where she continues her research by conducting interviews and some personal explorations. In swinging San Francisco she meets three remarkable women: a cheeky Hungarian named Dominique who sneers at the German work ethic and offers to help Dorothee in her research; Susie Sexpert, a specialist in sexual pleasures who has an astonishing collection of dildos, and finally the attractive Ramona, who performs a hot strip as a drag king in a lesbian bar. By the end of her journey Dorothee has rediscovered her own sexuality and put several illusions firmly behind her.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 22:00 Zoo Palast 2<\/span><\/p>\n Karera ga Honki de Amu toki wa<\/span><\/span><\/strong> Japan 2017 Eleven-year-old Tomo is pretty much left to her own devices. Unwashed dishes are piling up in the sink and supermarket onigiri are all there is to eat again. Tomo\u2019s single mother usually comes home late, and drunk. When she leaves her daughter for good one day the girl has to rely on help from her uncle, who takes in Tomo to live with him and his girlfriend Rinko. At their first meeting Tomo is flabbergasted to discover that Rinko is a transsexual. Rinko immediately sets about taking care of Tomo; not only does she lovingly prepare meals but she also succeeds in creating a new home for the girl. But before long cracks appear in their perfect nest. As in her last film Rentaneko (Panorama 2012) Japanese director Naoko Ogigami offers another story about finding a way out of one\u2019s loneliness; in the case of Tomo and her new family the solution is a mixture of human warmth, good food and the symbolic act of knitting. In quietly concentrated images the film portrays non-normative sexuality as a natural way of life and describes the value of families that are defined not by convention but by a loving, caring environment.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 18:30 Zoo Palast 1<\/span><\/p>\n Min Homosyster<\/span><\/span><\/strong> Sweden\/Norway 2017 Ten-year-old Cleo has a head full of questions: How can I tell if I’m in love with somebody? How do I know if I prefer boys or girls? Since her older sister began dating another girl, there are new, strange feelings stirring inside Cleo. During a trip to the Norwegian fjords, she broaches the subject with the young couple and is given some helpful advice.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 12:30 Filmtheater am Friedrichshain<\/span><\/p>\n The Misandrists<\/span><\/strong><\/span> Germany 2017 91′ Somewhere in Ger(wo)many … A radical female \u2018army of lovers\u2019 is preparing itself for a final revolution. Women are discussing, campaigning, menstruating and pondering the decline of patriarchy, learning about single sex reproduction, and having sex. But then of all people a young soldier appears, seeking refuge at this feminist convent; moreover, one of the women-warriors turns out to be a police informer. This brings their strict superintendent on the scene. And \u2018big mother\u2019 is not amused. \u201cTwo cocks! And a cop! In our house! That\u2019s intolerable!\u201d But one question remains: is it possible to have equality in a corrupt system? Or will cocks need to roll first?! As if Valerie Solanas had directed an episode of \u2018Schoolgirl\u2019s Report\u2019, Bruce LaBruce\u2019s latest piece of shenanigans revolves around a utopian world without men. The Canadian director, experienced Berlinale guest and Teddy award-winner (for Pierrot Lunaire) serves up a merry, anarchic dance in which political slogans fall as trippingly off the tongue as religious acclamations. Their sermons are \u2013 naturally \u2013 rounded off with \u2018A(wo)men\u2019. Sarcastic, very funny \u2013 and as queer as it gets.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 22:30 Cubix 7<\/span> V\u00eanus – Fil\u00f3 a fadinha l\u00e9sbica<\/span><\/span><\/strong> Brazil 2017 In this animated fairy-tale Filly, a lesbian fairy with nimble fingers, seduces women by day dressed as a boy. But at night something strange happens and soon half the population of Whatsit Village are eagerly queuing up.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 20:15 CineStar 3<\/span><\/p>\n Weirdos<\/span><\/span><\/strong> Canada 2016 \u2018I am a weirdo.\u2019 \u00b7 \u2018Honey, she is a weirdo, too. We are all weirdos. That\u2019s what makes us beautiful.\u2019 In laconic black-and-white, Bruce McDonald tells the humorous story of two adolescent runaways, Kit and Alice. On the eve of the 1976 United States Bicentennial, the film accompanies the two hitchhikers on a turbulent journey through the breathtaking landscape of the Canadian east coast, set to a quintessentially 1970s soundtrack. While Kit wants to start a new life in his glamorous but unstable mother’s artist commune, Alice makes no bones about her longing for romance. Yet in the glow of the crackling campfire of a beach party, they both reach new insights that put their relationship to the test. Likewise, the day following their joyous reunion sees Kit and his mother facing up to some uncomfortable truths.<\/p>\n 15.02. \/ 15:30 Filmtheater am Friedrichshain<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The 7th day of Berlinale and we really have to rest a little bit. It\u00b4s kind of exhausting in a way. But also really beautiful! You want to have a brief film tip? How about a chinese newcomer? The “rising star” of the chinese film scene shot a movie and it\u00b4s called: “The Taste of … Continue reading Day 7: The Taste of Betel Nut<\/span> ![\"OK_201719583_4-min\"](\"http:\/\/blog.teddyaward.tv\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/OK_201719583_4-min.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nBones of Contention<\/p>\n
\n75′
\nDirector: Andrea Weiss<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nCall me by your Name<\/p>\n
\n130′,
\nDirector: Luca Guadagnino<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nRustlers<\/p>\n
\n85′
\nDirector: Albertina Carri<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nDiscreet<\/p>\n
\n81′
\nDirector: Travis Mathews<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nEMO the Musical<\/p>\n
\n94′
\nDirector: Neil Triffett<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nFluid\u00f8<\/p>\n
\n80′
\nDirector: Shu Lea Cheang<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nGod’s Own Country<\/p>\n
\n104′
\nDirector: Francis Lee<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nI Am Not Your Negro<\/p>\n
\n93′
\nDirector: Raoul Peck<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nVirgin Machine<\/p>\n
\n84′
\nDirector: Monika Treut
\nCast: Ina Blum, Marecelo Uriona, Gad Klein, Mona Mur<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nClose-Knit<\/p>\n
\n127′
\nDirector: Naoko Ogigami
\nCast: Toma Ikuta, Rinka Kakihara, Kenta Kiritani<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nMy Gay Sister<\/p>\n
\n15′
\nDirector: Lia Hietala
\nCast: Juliette Safavi, Tina Pourdavoy, Erika A. Coleman<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nThe Misandrists<\/p>\n
\nDirector: Bruce LaBruce
\nCast: Susanne Sachsse, Viva Ruiz, Kembra Pfahler, Caprice Crawford<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n 15.02. \/ 22:30 Cubix 8<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nVenus – Filly the lesbian little fairy<\/p>\n
\n6′
\nDirector: S\u00e1vio Leite
\nCast: Helena Ignez<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n
\nWeirdos<\/p>\n
\n84′
\nDirector: Bruce McDonald
\nCast: Dylan Authors, Julia Sarah Stone, Molly Parker, Allan Hawco<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n