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Bear Hugs

Teddy Awards Celebrate Gay Film at the Berlinale

By Cameron Abadi in Berlin

The Berlin International Film Festival's annual Teddy Awards pay tribute to the best gay films in the festival. Now in its 21st year, the awards are more successful than ever -- but this year there are no German entries. Do gay filmmakers in Germany simply have it too good?

The Teddy Awards -- the Berlinale film festival's annual celebration of queer cinema -- will be marking its twenty-first year on Friday evening with a lavish awards ceremony at a nightclub in a hangar at Berlin's Tempelhof airport. It promises to be a high-profile party: With financial backing from Volkswagen, Amnesty International and European broadcaster Arte, the organizers can afford to be lavish.

The ceremony will be a far cry from the Teddys' modest roots. When the awards started in 1986, there was no awards ceremony, no celebrity jury, no dramatic opening of envelopes and no professionally-designed trophies for the winners. In its inaugural year, Manfred Salzberger, one of the former heads of the Berlinale, simply watched all the movies in the festival that happened to have queer themes and sent a store-bought teddy bear to the then-unknown directors -- today's critical darlings Gus Van Sant and Pedro Almodovar -- that he thought had done the best job.

From those humble beginnings, the Teddy Awards have grown to become one of the most prominent and influential parts of the festival. As the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung puts it, "Without movies about sexual identity, the Berlinale program would be noticeably thinner."

Scandals and virgins

This year, 35 movies are competing for the award, from big-budget productions like "Notes on a Scandal", starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, to off-beat independent movies, like "It Gonna Get Worse," a melancholy story about rebellious youth in communist Czechoslovakia. There's even one children's movie in the running: "Like a Virgin," a Korean film about a teenage wrestler discovering his sexuality.

For the first time, though, not one of the Teddy entrants is from Germany. Wieland Speck, head of the "Panorama" section of the Berlinale and organizer of the Teddy Awards, says that German gays have become accustomed to a society that largely accepts homosexuals. "I fear that most gay and lesbian directors have become satisfied with the status quo," Speck told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Clearly, they don't feel the urgency that people in other countries do."

This is a point seconded by German director and gay-pride activist Rosa von Praunheim. "You've got the religious right in America, you've got Islam, you've got a lot of repressive currents worldwide -- look at Warsaw, Poland, where there are reactionary tendencies, all very anti-gay," he says. "We live in a little golden land and assume it's the same everywhere, but our rights could be restricted again at any time."

Living in fear

The Teddy organizers have accordingly turned their attention to countries where homosexuals live in fear, forging a partnership for the first time with Amnesty International's gay-rights group MERSI. As part of that cooperation, the Teddy Awards website has invited writers from around the world to describe gay culture in their respective countries. Their discussions have highlighted aspects of queer life in South Africa, Turkey, Indonesia and the Arab world.

It's difficult, however, to attract film entrants from many regions of the world. Many film makers face legal penalties, a fact attested to by one of the Teddy nominees, "Here's Looking at You, Boy," a documentary history about queer cinema. One example that the film points to is India, where it is still taboo to depict any kissing on screen, even between a man and a woman.

Nonetheless, the organizers have tried to present films with explicitly political themes. Among them is "Moscow Gay Pride Festival," a documentary about a gay-pride festival in Moscow that led to violent counter-demonstrations from Russian religious and nationalist groups.

Inherently political

But, taken as a whole, the Teddy films suggest that the boundary between the political and the personal is a fuzzy one. "Here's Looking at You, Boy" suggests that all queer cinema is inherently political: The film argues that society's continued resistance to queer expression muddies the lines between art, entertainment and political struggle.

"Sex was politics in those days," director Joseph Lovett says in the film. "Having sex with a person of your gender, with another man was a criminal act. You were really doing something that was 'anti-social'. So to be able to do that was a revolutionary act."

The question remains, though, whether Hollywood productions, like last year's well-received "Brokeback Mountain," also show the required fortitude to make art out of a real -- and sometimes fatal -- struggle for gay rights. Could the Oscars one day make the Teddys irrelevant?

Speck, for one, is skeptical. According to him, the Academy Awards, and the Hollywood films they honor, pay lip service to political struggle while focusing on vanity, glamor and box office receipts.

The Teddy Awards, meanwhile, "are waging a battle against discrimination," Speck says, and empowering gays by providing a space in which their views can be expressed.

“There has been progress in emancipation, but the Teddys are engaged in a fight against discrimination that has not lost any importance,” he says.