TEDDY AWARD 2012
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
That was The Teddy Award 2012
Here you will find all information, interviews and videoclips of this year's winners, all galaclips, interviews with the TEDDY JURY and interviews about the most recent topics this year.
Best Feature Film: Keep the Lights on |
|
|
JURY: This film etches an intimate portrait of the difficulties in building relationships that are loving, supportive and truthful. Delicately balancing acute observation and cinematic mastery, the film brings alive universal themes with unique breadth of vision.
Manhattan in 1998. A semi-clad man lies on a bed dialling different phone numbers until he finds a suitable date for sex. When Erik first meets his date Paul the encounter unleashes a passion that at first appears to have no future. Nonetheless, two years later, the two men are sharing an apartment and their lives. Erik is a documentary filmmaker and Paul is an attorney who works regular hours. But the closeted, emotionally unstable Paul is prone to overdoing things. In between conversations, sex and drugs the pair struggles to create a life together but time and again their compulsions and addictions cause the relationship to run off the rails. Nonetheless, neither of them wants to give up and both are prepared to fight for their happiness together. From the word go director Ira Sachs approaches his depiction of this couple with an intimacy that is both honest and unflinching. The growing instability of their life together provides the viewer with an unsparing portrait of the nature of relationships in our times. In addition, the film allows us to rediscover two exceptional albeit forgotten actors: photographer and filmmaker Avery Willard and singer-composer Arthur Russell, whose stirring, sensual, score provides Erik’s musical leitmotiv. |
|
BEST Documentary: Call me Kuchu |
|
|
JURY: The jury recognizes an urgent story, intelligently and poignantly rendered, honouring the life and courageous example of an everyday hero while exposing shocking human rights violations. Its message resonates globally and issues a call to action.
The anti-homosexuality bill that religious groups in Uganda are trying to have passed, calls for imprisonment of homosexuals and, in ‘severe cases’ even the death penalty. In a country where ninety-five percent of the population condone the criminalisation of homosexuality, a group of queer activists are fighting to prevent this legislative proposal from going ahead.
This film describes the life of David Katos, Uganda’s first openly gay activist, and his comrades-in-arms. His is a life constantly pervaded by fear of attack, but also characterised by moments of happiness and celebration. The film contains the hate-filled and sarcastic tirades of Christian fanatics, but also introduces us to Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, the only cleric to demonstratively position himself on the side of the persecuted gay community and offer them his protection from attacks. Events take a tragic turn when David Kato is found dead in his bed having been bludgeoned to death. When at Kato’s funeral the parson begins to preach a hateful anti-gay sermon and causes uproar, Senyonjo once again steps in to give Kato his last rites and console the activist’s mourners. In its quietly observational way, this film portrays an exceptionally homophobic and Christian-fanatical environment, the extremity of which helps to strengthen Uganda’s LGTB community. |
|
Best shortfilm: Loxoro |
|
|
JURY: The jury was impressed by the masterful way this film illuminated and dignified the lives of a rarely-depicted community, evoking a grittiness and yet, a humanity seldom realized so fully in the short form.
Lima, Peru. Darkness. |
|
SPECIAL Jury Award: Jaurès |
|
|
JURY: Formally and narratively outstanding this film explores the human impulse to reconcile the personal and emotional self with the political. The jury recognizes an exceptional essay film of profundity and beauty.
A studio. A man and a woman. Moving images on the screen, which he comments on, spurred on by her questions. All the footage was shot from the window of a flat: views of the street, the metro line running above it, the canal, into the windows of the buildings opposite. The flat belongs to the man’s lover, the man is a guest, spending his nights there but never his days. By the canal, young men from Afghanistan set up makeshift shelters as the man looks on, developing increasing sympathy for them. The seasons change, winter, spring, summer.
Actress Eva Truffaut and director Vincent Dieutre are talking about love. The tone of their conversation is subdued, little more than a whisper. Although the camera’s gaze is fixed on the world beyond the window, it’s also about what’s behind it. The noises from outside mix with the tones from within. Simon, the lover, a trade-unionist and civil rights activist plays the piano. For Dieutre, he was a hero. “Simon taught me again what compassion is”. The relationship is over, he talks about him in the past tense, tenderly and full of respect. It’s just the key to Simon’s apartment at Paris metro station Jaurès that he never owned. |
|
Zuschauerpreis der Siegessaeule/Else: Parada |
|
|
JURY: Of all films of this year’s Berlinale edition PARADA stood out through its uniqueness. By means of using humor, one of the strongest and most transgressive agents that cinema has to offer, it conjoins not only homosexuals and homophobes on screen, but unites an entire audience. Its theatrical release in Serbia exemplified that PARADA – like no other film – has the power to convey the message that we all are human and need love, no matter how or who we love, to anyone, whether old or young, queer or straight. The jury would like to support the further distribution of the film and its message with its decision.
Turning transgression into a comedic principle, this turbulent farce that toys with clichés and stereotypes turned out to be an unexpected hit in Serbia and other ex-Yugoslavian countries. In PARADA a life-saving operation on a gangster’s pitbull terrier brings together two very different worlds: old school machismo meets gay obsession for interior design, homophobia meets overblown gender display as a number of former foes – Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo-Albanians and Croatian war veterans – find themselves obliged to form a tenuous bond with a bunch of gay activists. This motley crew are sent on an impossible and probably suicidal mission to protect a fresh attempt to hold a Gay Pride parade from renewed and certain onslaught from nationalists and neo-Nazi organisations and make the event a success. Srdjan Dragojevic’s film takes a look at survival strategies for gays in Serbia and at a society that even now, years after the Balkan war, is still fragmented and riven by two entrenched fronts. And, as one would expect from any comedy worthy of the name, no matter how tumultuous the plot, real-life tragedy is always hovering in the background, just a step away.
|
|
Special Teddy Award i: Ulrike Ottinger |
|
|
Already with her early works in the 70s Ulrike Ottinger became an culturally and emancipatory inspiring icon in the German movie landscape. Laokoon and sons, the Bewitching of the blue sailor and madame x anticipated social and aesthetic developments and were stylistic pioneers for a just upcoming punk-culture: Works of a true avant-gardist. In the 80s her movies formed an essential part of the West-Berliner Arthouse Film consciousness. To the conventional appearances of mankind, Ottinger's movies added a variety of facets, which made the dualisms such as man-woman or black-white look poor and which gave space to a diversity which today became a significant feature of the Berlin culture scene.
|
|
Sepcial TEDDY AWARD II: Mario Montez |
|
|
Godfather of all superstars and their blueprint at the same time: already with his first appearances in movies by us-underground-icon Jack Smith in the early 60s, Mario Montez frees equally the fantasy of the audience and future directors such as Andy Warhol or Ron Rice. Also in the legendary theaterevents by Ronald Tavel or Charles Ludlam Mario Montez left a significant impression: his play with identities, the exaggeration of the conservative gender-role-dictate created the image of a liberating-polysexual diva. At the latest with his appearances in the newly restored Jack Smith films in the Panorama in the middle of the 90s and in the broad Jack Smith retrospective in 2009 in the Cinema Arsenal, Mario Montez won back the Berlin audience.
|
|
Interviews with the Teddy Jury 2012Magnus Rosengarten speaks in today's interviews with this year's TEDDY JURY and they tell us about their impressions on the festival. |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Queer Academy |
|
|
So far there is no single institution, which collects queer cultural heritage and makes it accessable for everyone. Such a queer memory is the Queer Academy supposed to be. At the TEDDY GALA the Queer Academy is introduced. |
|
Transrespect vs. transphobie |
|
|
TEDDY's main topic this year is trans*. Magnus Rosengarten speaks in an interview with Julia Ehrt and Richard Köhler about trans* in Europe, challenges for trans* people and transphobia. |
|
Queer in TURKEY |
|
|
Bilge Taş, festival programmer and member of this year’s TEDDY JURY, speaks in an interview with Philipp Schmidt about the only queer filmfestival in Türkei, the situation for queer people in her country, and her motivations to organise filmfestivals. |
|
Queer iN THE CHANGE OF TIME |
|
|
In this interview Rosa von Praunheim speaks about his movie NOT THE HOMOSEXUAL IS PERVERTED BUT THE SOCIETY IN WHICH HE LIVES, about the change of the queer world and the possibilities to learn from the past. |
|
_230x153.jpg "KEEP THE LIGHTS ON")
_155x230.jpg "CALL ME KUCHU")
_230x129.jpg "JAURÈS")
_230x129.jpg "JAURÈS")
