Meeting the Call for Radical, Queer Joy Within a Festival on the Brink: The 40th Teddy Award at the 76th Berlinale

A funny thing has often happened to me on the way to the Berlinale. I’ve attended each of the last three years’ festivals; you’d think I’d know my way around well enough by now. And yet this year there were still times when I’d be trying to find a specific spot around Potsdamer Platz – the festival epicentre – and, all disoriented-like, expect my phone’s Maps app to guide me safely and promptly to my destination, only to find its GPS scrambled, my phone seemingly no longer able to discern magnetic north. How much longer, I would ask myself, would I be wandering around in circles, my anxiety mounting as time ticked down ever closer to a session’s start and a cinema’s doors’ closing?

This has happened so many times that I’ve come less and less facetiously to wonder if there isn’t some technological remnant of Cold War cloak-and-dagger shenanigans ensconced within the Platz and running interference – after all, back in the day, Potsdamer Platz was bisected by the Berlin Wall. Is it possible? Is that how we might account not only for the frequent loss of my and my GPS’s bearings around the Berlinale’s central hub, but also for Wim Wenders’ gormless pronouncements at the opening press conference of the festival, delivered in the Berlinale Press Centre in the Grand Hyatt Berlin, located but minutes away from Potsdamer Platz at Marlene-Dietrich-Platz 2?

Could there, in actual fact, be some sort of James Bond-worthy cognitive dissonance force field operational there, something so strong it could escape the bounds of fiction and fabulation and reduce esteemed filmmakers-cum-Jury Presidents to blurt out nonsense like “We have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics. But we are the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.”¹ Gosh! What was that sound – was it Ms Dietrich, the legendary anti-fascist, rolling in her grave?

I hadn’t really wanted to rehash the whole sorry, well-documented shitshow-cum-clusterfuck that Wenders’ statements set in motion, which came to the very cusp of rendering Tricia Tuttle’s incumbency as Festival Director untenable and nearly led to the Berlinale’s wholesale defangment, its curatorial autonomy threatened to the point of rendering the festival irrelevant. But as there’s no room in this report for elephants, the quickest of sketches must follow.

At the opening press conference, German journalist Tilo Jung, flagging the German government’s support for both Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the Berlinale, stated that “The Berlinale as an institution has famously shown solidarity with the people in Iran and Ukraine, but never with Palestine”, before posing the question “do you, as the jury, support this selective treatment of human rights, even today?”

Wenders replied as above; by the day following, the snowballing had begun in earnest, with Booker prize-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy withdrawing from the festival in disgust. This triggered a flurry of open letters back and forth between Tricia Tuttle and/or the Berlinale, and dismayed festival participants, past and present. 

On February 14, Tuttle’s “On Speaking, Cinema and Politics” was published on the “Berlinale Notes” page on the festival’s website, acknowledging “the immense suffering of people in Gaza and the West Bank” (and elsewhere), but without acknowledging that there was, of course, a principal agent of that colossal, epochal distress.²

“Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton Among 104 Names to Sign Open Letter Criticizing Berlin Film Festival for ‘Silence’ on Gaza: ‘We Are Dismayed’”, read the scoop headline in Variety three days later.³ Swinton, notably, had delivered a memorable Opening Night oratory at last year’s festival and introduced a screening the following morning of Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death (1987), a combination that made clear her longtime support for the Palestinian cause.

Things calmed a little for a few days… and then came Chronicles from the Siege director Abdallah Alkhatib’s acceptance speech for Best First Feature at the festival’s closing ceremony on February 21. It culminated in a direct address to the German government – substantively the Berlinale’s largest financial supporter: “You are partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel. I believe you are intelligent enough to recognise this truth. But you choose to not care. Free Palestine, from now until the end of the world.”⁴ Incensed by the statement as well as a photo taken at the film’s premiere in which Tuttle posed with the Palestine flag-sporting film delegation, the conservative German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, Wolfram Weimer, called an emergency meeting of the state-owned supervisory body he chairs (the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin, aka the KBB). Said body is charged with overseeing the Berlinale, among other high-profile cultural events in the nation’s capital. The festival and its director’s futures were to be discussed at this meeting, Weimer had thundered. Implications of Tricia Tuttle’s likely toppling were abundantly clear.

Cue, four days later, an “Open Letter in Support of Tricia Tuttle” from the entire Berlinale team, rallying as one behind their beleaguered director, with the same statement of support appearing not only on the “Berlinale Notes” page⁵ but also on individual staffers’ social media posts. In the meantime, an “Open Letter on the Future of the Berlinale” had also emerged, eventually to gain Tilda Swinton’s and an additional 2,277 verified signatures before closing, asserting that “the Berlinale has always been political – not party-political, but socially engaged”⁶ – paging Wim Wenders, come in Wim! – and that, moreover, Weimer and his drones should kindly back the fuck off (if put a little more delicately).

All quite exhausting – even as a bystander. And hugely distracting, for one and all.

Looking for inspiration for next year’s director’s statement, Tricia Tuttle might like to dispense with the many bromides that littered this edition’s (“The Berlinale is not simply an event that happens in this city; it is an expression of this city. A city overflowing with stories and history”,⁷ and the like) to revisit instead her opening remarks from 2025, her inaugural Berlinale:

People often ask us if we are a political festival. And yes, while I’d say we are a social festival, politics is in our DNA. We are the only major A-list festival that is in a capital city, and Berlin is a city steeped in history. We do not shy away from this.⁸

And thus might next year’s festival get off on the right foot… and hopefully abide by such purposeful talk, and stay on it too.

With that all dusted off, I can now share my brass tacks impressions of the 76th Berlinale’s hosting of a milestone 40th edition of the Teddy Awards: the longest-standing and most prestigious queer film prize in the world.

Consider the following a companion to an interview in this same issue, conducted mid-festival with Berlinale Co-Director of Film Programming and Teddy board member Michael Stütz,⁹ the better to paint a fuller picture of the Teddy, its relationship to a festival that it operates both independently of and yet is embedded within, and its significance across times that’re growing appreciably more turbulent by the minute.

The Blood Countess

To attempt to catch all of a year’s Teddy titles is a fool’s errand – and this year more than most. For atop all of the films shortlisted for a Teddy across all of the Berlinale’s contemporary production-oriented program strands, there are a number of other films flagged on teddyaward.tv as, one might say, Teddy-adjacent: not queer queer, but of interest to a queer audience nonetheless.

That might be as a function of possessing a queer secondary character (à la Dan Levy’s surprisingly ripped gay assistant – that old chestnut! – to Amy Adams’ alcoholic dance company suprema protagonist in Kornél Mundruczó’s so-so competition title At the Sea). Or perhaps there’s a queer director at work whose new film carries a discernible queer sensibility, as in the case of the legendary German auteuse Ulrike Ottinger and Die Blutgräfin (The Blood Countess), in which Isabelle Huppert got to sink her teeth into the oft-assayed role of Erzsébet Báthory. A triumph of rococo set design above all else, the film is campy good fun but can’t sustain the sugar-rush level of inventive silliness it commences with. But hooray for the opportunity granted to see Ottinger and la Huppert at the festival in the flesh!

Sam Dunn and renowned guitar hero and D&D enthusiast Tom Morello’s Teddy-listed rockumentary The Ballad of Judas Priest enjoyed its world premiere with a huge sense of occasion at the regrettably still naming rights-branded Uber Eats Music Hall. For Priest frontman Rob Halford was in the house, seeing it for the first time himself like the rest of us! But… where were all the gays? The crowd felt like it skewed very metal and straight; despite Halford’s being out since the late ‘90s, it seems queers are still yet to flock en masse to Judas Priest and their highly queer-coded metal kindred. Is class the hurdle gays still need surmount in order to embrace Halford, to match the extent to which the metal community long ago embraced his homosexuality – is heavy metal still too “rough trade” for bourgie gays? Well, I had a great time at the premiere; Dunn and Morello’s doco’s a delight and Halford a rock legend whose working-class roots, as with so many bandmates and peers profiled in the documentary, have kept him admirably grounded and of the people – all of the people.

Also Teddy-listed but not shortlisted, Ashley Walters’ Animol was a gripping British juvenile detention drama in the Perspectives first features program. It was strong enough a film to be worthy of a Teddy but was perhaps not shortlisted for fear that to do so would telegraph too much the extent to which queer sexuality is, or isn’t, integral to its drama’s unfolding. This speaks to a bind many a queer film programmer has found themself in – whether to include such a film in a queer film program (and risk spoilers), or to exclude it (and be culpable of queer erasure – and in this case, Black queer erasure to boot.)

There was a final category of films listed by team Teddy this year – those gracing a wonderful retrospective in celebration of the Teddy’s 40th anniversary, inclusive of landmark titles like The Watermelon Woman (1996); director and star Cheryl Dunye was present, what’s more! Late, lamented, local legend Rosa von Praunheim’s Tunten lügen nicht (Queens Don’t Cry, 2002) also featured – as at least one of his films surely had to!

Moreover, the festival’s annual, hefty, Deutsche Kinemathek-curated retrospective program this year was themed “Lost in the 90s” and opened with a brand-new digital restoration of Kutluğ Ataman’s Kreuzberg-set Lola und Bilidikid (Lola and Billy the Kid, 1999), concerning a troupe of Turkish migrant drag queens variously at odds with one another, with Germans of varying class strata and malevolence, and within themselves. I thought the film a revelation – complex, messy, lurid, decidedly intersectional and highly relevant to the Berlin of today. It was lovely attending a packed screening in what felt at once like a very official and an off-piste location: a slightly makeshift screening hall in E-Werk: the very Fabrik-flavoured temporary new digs of the Kinemathek.

Saccharine

But what of those films actually shortlisted for a Teddy, you ask? Well… while many of them were inarguably well credentialled in terms of dramatised or non-fictional representation of lives led by LGBTQIAtoZ folk, there were only a few I saw which I would argue a case for being queer in form. I fear this will sound a little lofty and pretentious, but I found a lot of the new queer films this year decidedly middlebrow. They were not bad, by any stretch, and this is not to say that I wasn’t exposed to characters and stories I’d never encountered before, or that these films didn’t move me.

Rather, works as disparate as Leyla Bouzid’s French-Tunisian, intergenerational, cross-cultural, family secret-riddled lesbian drama À voix basse (In a Whisper); Sophie Heldman’s austere, early 19th century-Edinburgh-set The Education of Jane Cumming, based on the true story of calumnied, tentatively-lesbian teachers that inspired William Wyler’s starry teachers-in distress flick, The Children’s Hour (1961); Ian de la Rosa’s southern-Spanish, class struggle, culture clash, transmasc romantic drama Iván & Hadoum; and Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Mouse, about a grieving, unprepossessing gay high schooler in Arkansas all at sea after her popular bestie’s death, all played by a conventional formal copybook. They were all compelling narrative-driven feature films, no doubt, with Iván & Hadoum proving a popular eventual winner of the Teddy for Best Feature Film, as adjudged by a re-expanded, five member-strong jury featuring Saagar Gupta, Skadi Loist, Daniela Vega, Sigal Yehuda and Ray Yeung.

But… while they were all queer films, could any of them have been said to have queered cinema?

Closer to the mark, for mine: Natalie Erika James’ Saccharine, a campy, Melburnian, gross-out, weight loss body horror flick included as a Berlinale Special Midnight offering. Concerning a young queer woman’s (Midori Francis) recourse to an improbably ghoulish, cannibalistic obesity remedy, it’d play well as a fun, palate-cleansing second film in a double bill with last year’s harrowing body dysmorphia horror, Den Stygge Stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister, Emilie Blichfeldt). 

Also treading genre terrain, Victoria Linares Villegas’ feature-length fiction début No Salgas (Don’t Come Out) caught me completely off-guard. As it was placed in the Generation 14plus program, I was not expecting a scene of bloody brutality in its very opening; indeed, this dread-filled, Dominican coming-of-age flick, in which so much as casting one’s eyes upon a young adult grappling with their sexuality might serve to turn one into a homicidal zombie, was full of surprises.

But the Teddy-nommed films that most met the zeitgeist for me were those that dared to experiment, being a brace of hybrid works (details to follow), a documentary on an experimental filmmaker rich in footage from her films and archive (Brydie O’Connor’s glorious Barbara Hammer tribute, Barbara Forever) or Der Heimatlose (Trial of Heim, Kai Stänicke), a fiction film with a conventional narrative set-up rendered unconventional by its recourse to a Brechtian location shoot. I’ll work my way backwards through these.

Concerning the return to a tiny, insular community by the titular closeted gay man, after many years away (Paul Boche), Trial of Hein looks like nothing so much as a North Sea island fishing village-set Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003). All the community’s homes and buildings boast little more than a façade and threadbare interior furnishings, ostensibly open to the elements but played as if not. Its Rashomon-esque inquiry into the different readings of events linked to Hein’s motivations and actions in leaving the island all those years ago might have worked just as well had all of the island’s buildings been rendered in a manner striving for verisimilitude… but the film’s definitely more interesting for not having taken that tack. I couldn’t begrudge it the Teddy Jury Award it took home.

Barbara Forever won the Best Documentary/Essay Film Teddy. It’s only fitting – Hammer herself won Teddies for Best Short Film in 2009 (A Horse Is Not a Metaphor) and in 2011 – twice that year, even! – for Generations (co-directed by Gina Carducci) and Maya Deren’s Sink. Moreover, the inspirational Barbara Forever is for the most part an assemblage of the prolific, pioneering, lesbian feminist avant-gardist’s found footage, whether material to have previously graced her essential body of released work or drawn from privileged access to her extensive personal archive.

The film most steeped in radical, queer joy I caught all festival was, aptly enough, Joy Boy: A Tribute to Julius Eastman, a Belgian-French-Congolese collaboration of interdisciplinary artists taking a variety of approaches – some parts abstract music visualisation, other parts dancing in, and reclaiming, the streets of Kinshasa – to interpreting some of Eastman’s mesmerising avant-garde classical compositions and paying tribute to his unabashed, activistic celebration of his Black, gay identity. All six directors (Mawena Yehouessi, Fallon Mayanja, Rob Jacobs, Victoire Karera Kampire, Paul Shemisi and Anne Reijniers) were present for a lively Q&A, presenting a united front in celebrating all that Eastman – a figure I hitherto knew next to nothing about – stood for, and against, and explaining that theirs is in fact a work of transmedia, manifesting at other times as a variably configurable, multi-screen gallery installation, sometimes accompanied by live musical performances. I’d wager I’d love to experience any of those other manifestations too.

Lastly in this vein, there was Fil Ieropoulos’ wildly kaleidoscopic Uchronia – a tirelessly playful film existing outside of conventional realms of genre (is it an agitprop essay film? A series of dogmatic, performance art vignettes? A found footage freak-out? All of the above, and more?) Certainly, it’s a militantly queer call to rise up and honour the hard-won gains achieved by the revolutionary queers of yesteryear. Our spirit guide throughout is the ghost of Arthur Rimbaud (Kristof Lamp); our mission, should we choose to accept it (and we should, nay, must!): to veer Europe away from its fearmongering, homophobic, transphobic trajectory toward something more worthy of the memories of queer rabble-rousers like Emma Goldman, Marsha P. Johnson or Jack Smith. The latter, in one vignette, per my favourite chapter heading of this richly, irreverently referential film, abducts Andy Warhol with “his freaks”; a saturnine, bound Warhol (Robert Carrithers) then delivers an affectless, ransom note reading of lines like “the promised 15 minutes of fame of dull, uninteresting people paved the way for the alt-right” – which may well be correct. It was fascinating to clock Charlie Kaufman and his recent collaborator, the writer Eva H.D., as executive producers. What larks! (But also: what high stakes this film speaks to!)

What Will I Become

My exalting only these few more radical films is doubtless a little unfair. Why, there were other strong Teddy contenders of such varied flavours as Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos’ painfully raw, autobiographically-informed documentary investigation into the high suicide rate of young transmasculine folk, What Will I Become?, and Paraguayan filmmaker Marcelo Martinessi’s noir-inflected Narciso, a queer Footloose (Herbert Ross, 1984)-of-sorts problematising what was and what wasn’t deemed officially suitable to be broadcast across the airwaves live before a studio audience in late 1950s Asunción. Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig’s Jaripeo – a documentary exploration of intersections of machismo and queer acceptance in the remote, rodeo-mad town of Michoacán, Mexico, near where co-director Mojica spent some of his formative years – was also highly enjoyable and eye-opening.

But for mine this year’s queer cinema needed a sense of political urgency to really meet the moment. Fortunately, Special Teddy Award recipient Céline Sciamma read the room brilliantly – her acceptance speech at the 40th Teddy Award ceremony was a glittering night’s standout moment. After beginning with a grin, stating that receiving the award’s “like getting a second cat,” Sciamma went on to ask “what can cinema do?” and to “reflect on the power of that language, its responsibility. These days, it’s mostly painful; these days, the most important cameras are in Palestine, they’re in Tehran, in Ukraine, in Calais, in Minneapolis. The most important cameras are in the hands of those who resist, protest, bear witness. They are in the hands of the oppressed.”¹⁰

Oh, had only Wim Wenders uttered something of this substance at the opening press conference, a whole lotta drama and distraction, and existential peril, might have been nipped in the bud. Right now, cinema must not, can not, “stay out of politics.” For politics, demonstrably, will not stay out of cinema, queer or otherwise. And to choose not to engage with that superabundantly clear reality is to risk irrelevance or, worse, obliteration. As we should all by now well appreciate.

Berlinale
12 – 22 February 2026
https://www.berlinale.de

Endnotes