Teddy Award Berlin - Der queere Filmpreis

Ulrike Ottinger is an exceptional filmmaker and artist. Her cinematic universe has influenced entire generations. As a young woman, she brought the international art world to the sleepy town of Konstanz. It all began on the shores of Lake Constance where Ulrike Ottinger was born and where she still often spends time. Filmmaker Brigitte Kramer chose to begin her film at Lake Constance since she too shares Ottinger’s birthplace and a great love of these waters. This is also where the filmmaker’s [...] more

This film is part of a series of films on gay men who survived the Nazi era. I met Walter Schwarze when he was already in his eighties. My camera recorded his first public account of his five-year incarceration as a homosexual at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was in his fifties when he met Ali in his hometown of Leipzig; the two men became partners and re-mained close until his demise. And yet, Walter told me, he felt he had lived in vain because he had not had the good fortune of today's [...] more

Pablo is a writer and is HIV positive. When he learns that he will probably die within a year he starts to write a diary. The object of the exercise is not so much to create a piece of literature as to try to define his personal status quo. Pablo wants his diary to describe, like a compass, all the different directions in which his disease and his struggle for control over his body has led him. Pablo’s task is also bound up with the desire to ease his suffering – not just the physical [...] more

A single night can feel very long sometimes, especially if you’re on a tiny raft, can’t swim and are surrounded by sharks. There are just ninety miles of water between Cuba and Florida. Desperate to leave, plenty of Cubans choose make this risky trip across the sea. So too Lila’s twin brother Elio. Lila always thought he could ever leave her – after all, they’ve been together ever since they were born. But of late he’s been distracted and has had less and less [...] more

Some women love theirs, others hate them. And then there are those who take theirs to a plastic surgeon. Fifteen women comment on their relationship to their breasts. more

Freely drawing from a variety of film genres, including musicals, the sudsy melodramas and documentaries and combing them with a free-flowing narrative and bright pop-art sensibilities, this hard-hitting experimental romp from Canadian filmmaker John Greyson packs a political wallop while satirically comparing and contrasting the issues of censorship and circumcision. The tale centers on the exploits of three homosexuals named Peter. Peter Koosens is obsessed with the semi-scandalous behavior [...] more

UNTER MÄNNERN – SCHWUL IN DER DDR addresses the question of how gay men lived and could live their lives under ‘real socialism’, where GDR ideology considered homosexuality to be a remnant of bourgeois decadent morality and harmful to a socialist society. In this documentary we meet six men who talk openly about their social and intimate experiences, some for the first time, and get to know several individuals who could hardly be more diverse, or more contradictory. At one [...] more

Eisenstein, Mishima, Frida Kahlo and other dead artists are uncannily summoned on a mission to probe the policing of public toilets in Ontario. They discover that, since 1981, hundreds of men have been arrested, victims of video surveillance. The key to all this seems to be a portrait of Dorian Gray. Part news story, part surreal comic invention, John Greyson's URINAL is at the cutting edge of new gay cinema: passionate, playful, complex and sharp. (frameline)  more

UTOPIANS recounts the origins of an unlikely family made up of three independent yet emotionally needy individuals: Roger, a struggling yoga teacher; Zoe, his headstrong Iraq veteran daughter; and Maya, Zoe’s reckless girlfriend. Roger teaches yoga. The relationship with his daughter Zoe, who has just finished her military service, is put under strain by her love for Maya, a young woman who is allegedly a certified schizophrenic. There is tension with the participants of his yoga class [...] more