According To The variety This year marks the 39th annual Teddy Award honors, the longest-running LGBTQ+ prizes at any major film festival. While the Feb. 21 closing ceremony is business as usual for the Berlinale, global events could make this one of the most important years in Teddy history.
U.S. President Trump is implementing numerous anti-transgender policies, withdrawing President Biden’s executive order making federal agencies enforce a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that sex discrimination laws include LGBTQ discrimination, and even declaring that there are only two sexes – seemingly oblivious to children born intersex, a plot point in one of this year’s biggest Oscar contenders. His appointee Elon Musk regularly makes anti-trans statements and endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party, which has opposed some gay rights.
Yet for now, films celebrated by the Teddys may help provide essential counterpoints to it all.
“I can’t remember a recent year where there was no queer film in [the main] competition in Berlin,” said Michael Stütz, who took over as head of the Panorama section in 2019, overseeing Teddy contenders from all sections of the Berlinale. “Queer cinema has become part of the DNA of the festival,” he added. “This is a testament to how queer filmmaking has evolved in the past decades.”
Stütz noticed this five years ago, when a better gender balance and increase in BIPOC representation emerged after “the dominance of gay white male stories.”
That progress is reflected in the Teddys’ international acceptance. Starting this year, the best documentary feature winner will automatically be added to the Oscars’ doc feature longlist. The 2025 contenders include Billy Shebar and David Roberts’ portrait of composer Meredith Monk, “Monk in Pieces,” and Yihwen Chen’s Malaysian punk rock doc “Queer as Punk,” which Stütz said is “definitely a film about LGBTQI* rights, in a country where being queer is illegal.”
That political relevance can also be found in several best feature contenders. One is Shatara Michelle Ford’s Panorama player “Dreams in Nightmares,” a road movie about “three queer Black femmes” traveling through the American Midwest, revealing “a lot of the same questions and adversaries we are facing in Europe,” Stütz said. Another Panorama competition entry, Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor’s semi-autobiographical “Dreamers,” is set in a U.K. asylum removal center. “This is not a story of what it means to be an immigrant or how appalling the immigration system is, even though those things are true,” Gharoro-Akpojotor said in her director’s statement. “This is a story about two women who find love in the most unlikely of places despite facing a very uncertain future.”
Though the first-time feature writer/director was never placed in a facility like her lead character, they’re both Nigerian migrants who needed to prove that they were gay when seeking asylum. The film’s focus aligns with her Joi Prods.’ mission to make Black-, queer- and female-led projects, but also attract other audiences. “I think people are able to relate more to the love story,” she said. “I don’t want to be in an echo chamber.” It was a struggle to put together her £1.3 million budget for a film without stars. “It’s harder now to make any film, [and] when you add any kind of diversity, it’s doubly harder.”
And unlike the Teddys’ relationship with the Berlinale, the Queer Palm awards is not yet an official part of the Cannes Film Festival 15 years after its launch. Founding president Franck Finance-Madureira — who’ll speak at a Feb. 19 Queer Creations Teddy Talk panel in Berlin — recently created the first Queer Palm Lab for five first-time filmmakers with mentorship from “Close” director Lukas Dhont. They’re now accepting applications for a second edition with ”Aftersun” helmer Charlotte Wells, but still struggling to find funding.
“It’s always complicated to create events on LGBTQ topics in France, because big brands are not really ready to be involved,” Finance-Madureira said. “The debates about gay marriage [which was legalized in 2013] were tough, and a lot of companies saw that half of France was having difficulties with this topic. But I think it’s getting more difficult worldwide.”
Nevertheless, given everything happening around the world now, Gharoro-Akpojotor agreed that queer films can make a difference. ”It’s important for people to see versions of themselves,” she says, “and it’s equally important for other people to see that we exist.”
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