Teddy Award Berlin - Der queere Filmpreis

A young couple celebrates their first wedding anniversary. Having both prepared surprises for each other, they crack open a bottle of champagne and, proudly showing each other their wedding rings, they look back on their relationship. With musical accompaniment from Frida Selander, they ponder such questions as marital rows, quarrels with their peers, the desire for children, and their daily lives “B TEME”. more

Won-Gyu is a flight attendant and is constantly in transit. Anonymous hotel rooms are all the home he knows. Tae-Jun is a motorbike courier who spends almost all his time on the streets. Two men with two jobs that keep them on the move. Two lives that are just a series of fleeting moments. Having clicked on the internet they arrange to meet in Seoul. But they only have a few hours. Won-Gyu never wanted to return to the city because Seoul reminds him of an event that has left him sad and angry. [...] more

In 1995 BALLOT MEASURE 9 shocked movie-goers with its inside views of a divisive gay-rights battle and with the unprecedented violence the campaign rhetoric provoked across the state of Oregon - such that local activists, risking their lives, were given full-time police protection, slept with guns under their beds, and on election night wore bullet proof vests. Families were torn apart, neighbor set against neighbor. Director Heather Lyn MacDonald ducks behind the headlines to bare the [...] more

Bambi was born Jean-Pierre Pruvot in a tiny Algerian village in 1935. Even as a child,she refused to meet the expectations of her extended family, choosing instead to find a way to become the woman she always knew herself to be. A Cabaret Carrousel de Paris performance in Algiers in the 1950s proved to be all the encouragement she needed to emigrate to the French capital, assume the stage name of ‘Bambi’ and lead the life she longed for on the music-hall stages. Jean-Pierre, known [...] more

Using interviews and archive material, the film reconstructs a bank raid which may not have gone down in history, yet has made film history – due to Sidney Lumet’s psychological drama DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975), in which Al Pacino plays the desperate and luckless bank robber Sonny Wortzik. Lumet’s suspenseful thriller is based on a true story; his protagonist is modelled on a man whose real name is John Wojtowicz. On a hot August afternoon in 1972, Wojtowicz rushes into a Brooklyn [...] more

A hospital in the middle of Tehran. The waiting room is full of mostly young people, drawn there by their desperation. They can't live out their love and desire and so they want to alter their gender. In the Islamic Republic of Iran homosexuality is punishable by death, while the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced transsexuality legal twenty years ago. Around 450 sex changes are performed each year in Iran. The film follows a group of people shortly before the difficult intervention. A tomboyish [...] more

Maya refuses to believe that her relationship with Tamar is over. Instead, she tries everything in her power to prevent Tamar from leaving the country. more

Few shone as brightly in the 1960/70’s, as the transgender pioneer Candy Darling. Andy Warhol discovered her and cast her in his films; Lou Reed wrote two songs ("Candy Says" & "Walk On The Wildside") about her and Tennessee Williams wrote her a starring role in one of his plays ("Small Craft Warnings"). Interwoven with Candy’s story is the story of Candy’s dear friend Jeremiah Newton, who kept her belongings and her cremated remains [...] more

Detlef Gumm and Hans-Georg Ullrich began working on their long-term observational documentary BERLIN – ECKE BUNDESPLATZ twenty-four years ago. Their plan was to make a series of short and longer films documenting the fortunes of several inhabitants of an ordinary Berlin neighbourhood as they moved towards the year 2000. The protagonists were a typical cross-section of people living an old quarter of West-Berlin, and so, in their film, widows, a high-flying lawyer, drop-outs, owners of small [...] more

Friday afternoon in a park in Jerusalem. Shabbat is about to begin and people are making their final preparations. The park is almost empty – apart from the gay cruising scene. A young man, Oren, needs to make a phone call, but he hasn’t got a mobile with him. He addresses a passing orthodox Jew but isn’t sure if the man has even understood him. But the cleric is after something else entirely. Oren acquiesces,caught between curiosity and fear, desire and danger. Then his lover [...] more

She was afraid to come out of the locker  She was as nervous as she could be  She was afraid to come out of the locker  She was afraid that somebody would see  (Two, three, four, tell the people what she wore)  It was an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini  That she wore for the first time today… An animated musical, BIKINI stars a young man, dolled up in his mother’s yellow swim suit, who is afraid to come out of the changing [...] more

Ender and Çetin – both in their late thirties – have been friends since they were at school together. Çetin has been away for many years. Now he has returned to Ankara and has moved in with Ender, just as the friends always imagined they would. Their best friend, Fikret, who lives in Germany and is spending his holiday in Turkey, is involved in a traffic accident which kills both his parents and leaves him injured. When the time comes for him to return to Germany, he [...] more

Santiago, Chile, in 1986. Luchito is 13 years old and feels deeply attracted to Manuel, a 16-year-old neighbour. Luchito masturbates whilst watching the window of an adjacent building where Manuel is enjoying a sexual encounter with a neighbourhood girl. The window becomes an erotic stage that arouses Luchito’s curiosity – but this has catastrophic consequences for Manuel.

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Sixteen-year-old Axel has dropped out of school; he has no apprenticeship in sight and the relationship with his family, especially his stepfather, is deteriorating rapidly. Axel chooses to hang out with a gang of Neo-Nazis and skinheads, who become the friends he craves. But everything in life has its price. Led by the violent Lippi, the neo-Nazis attack a charitable soup kitchen. A series of unfortunate events lead to Axel stabbing to death Thomas Lorenz, the social worker in charge. On the [...] more

Alfred has left northern France to look for his mother in Marseille. She works as a prostitute, and he changes his name to be near her. more

Like everywhere else in the world, gays and lesbians in Cameroon also seek refuge in the city. The two young gay men in this film are crazy about Rihanna and Lady Gaga, who has been a gay icon since her hit song ‘Born this way’. But the tolerance Lady Gaga sings about is just a dream for these two young men. In their country, homosexual relations are subject to punishment of up to five years’ imprisonment, andit is almost impossible to come out to your own family. This film describes [...] more

Helmer is 55 and a bachelor. He tends a remote farm and looks after his ailing father.Theirs is a brittle, tight-lipped relationship. When his father moves ever clother towards the grave, Helmer shifts him upstairs. He then clears out all the junk from the ground floor, throws the house plants on the dung heap, orders a new bed, and begins to live a life of his own. From time to time, Ada from the neighbouring farm drops in with her sons, and the milk truck driver regularly seeks Helmer’s [...] more

Guy and his sister grow up on an island. His domineering mother keeps watch over everything from the tip of a lighthouse, his eccentric father experiments in the basement laboratory. Then there are the orphans, on whose heads the adoptive parents later find puzzling wounds. Another brother and sister pair is sent to the island: the Lightball Kids, two detectives that are meant to bring light into the darkness. The brothers and sisters are all yanked into the emotional roller coaster of first love, [...] more

Praised by Jonas Mekas in 1970 as “propaganda for the politics of joy and disorder”, painter and writer Wynn Chamberlain’s BRAND X is back – finally! – to provide contemporary audiences with a strangely refreshing dose of late ’60s countercultural humour and political satire. After a successful run throughout the USA in the early ’70s, the only print of the film disappeared for almost 40 years before mysteriously resurfacing in its production company’s [...] more

This film marks Neil Jordan’s second screen adaptation, after “The Butcher Boy”, of a novel by Patrick McCabe. In his book, the Irish writer describes a series of hilarious and drastic episodes in the (fictional) life of a young Irish transvestite named Patrick “Kitten” Braden, who gains something of a reputation working the streets around Piccadilly Circus in London in the 1970s. Patrick is born in 1958, in Tyreelin, close to the border with Northern Ireland. At [...] more

Twin brothers Barry and Tom Howe live in the country – but their dream is to live the fast-and-loose lives of rock stars. Sooner than they ever dared hope, their dream comes true. Before long, they are much more than just a insider‘s tip for those in the know; in fact, they are soon regarded as the next big thing. Petulant managers, wily concert organisers, vitriolic journalists, groupies, sex, drugs and alcoholic excesses – Barry and Tom go through everything that true rock [...] more

When the second Intifada began, Israel closed its borders to workers from Palestinian territories who, during the previous years had taken on all the worst-paid jobs in the land. Just as in many industrialised countries, in Israel tasks such as housework or caring for the elderly are often delegated to foreign workers. Israel’s policy left a big hole in the job market, and so the Israeli authorities began to encourage workers from other parts of the world to emigrate to Israel to fill the [...] more

It’s monsoon season in Singapore during the Vietnam War. Bugis Street, the epicentre of multisexual nightlife and unchained libido, is where a band of hedonistic, transidentical poeple has taken root at the wacky love hotel SinSin. The lives of this crew of truly perverse, polymorph creatures are devoted exclusively to their dreams, beauty, desire and pleasure. Enter sixteen-year-old Lian, fresh from the country. She has come to this cheerfully hysterical madhouse to start work as a home [...] more