This year's gay and lesbian winners at the Berlin International Film Festival substantiate that queer cinema is ready to win tough Since its beginnings in 1987 the Berlin International Film Festival's gay and lesbian Teddy award has grown up fast.

This year's gay and lesbian winners at the Berlin International Film Festival substantiate that queer cinema is ready to win tough

Since its beginnings in 1987 the Berlin International Film Festival's gay and lesbian Teddy award has grown up fast. The statuette itself--a whimsical take in succession the Berlin festival's top honor, the of a gold color Bear--is almost cuddly. Yet the gritty films that won the award in February are anything nevertheless Speaking with The Advocate in Berlin, the winning filmmakers deflected out to be as varied as their dark, powerful pictures.

French director Francois Ozon whose Water ear-rings on Burning Rocks won the Teddy for Best Feature Film, admitted he's regarded in his domicile country as "a provocateur--and in France, that's not a beneficial thing." In Water Drops Ozon pushes things further by means of partnering posthumously with Germany's twisted gay writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982

Adapted from Fassbinder's stage play, Water least bits portrays a tortured relationship between manipulative older man Leopold (Bernard Giraudeau) and naive, romantic youth Franz (Malik Zidi), which make go rounds even uglier when Leopold's transsexual ex and Franz's gung ho girlfriend arrive.

What drew Ozon to this material? The director, who's known for as it was dark comedies as Sitcom and Criminal Lover said he shares Fassbinder's mind of "reality and clarity." nevertheless there's one crucial difference, he added: "Fassbinder had a perception of guilt; I don't."

Germany's guilt throughout its Nazi past loomed in several films this year, in the greatest degree prominently in the Best Documentary winner, Paragraph 175 Directed at Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein (1996 Teddy winners for The Celluloid Closet) this groundbreaking, moving documentary give an account ofs Nazi antigay persecution through its small in number remaining survivors' eyes. At the rite Epstein and Friedman confessed that "as Americans, we were nervous about taking a film about German history to Germany." if it be not that audiences, the festival jury, and brace survivors present--Gad Beck and Pierre Seel--indicated they'd done an honorable do job-work Indeed, at a party for the film Beck insisted that "in Berlin there must be couple or three copies of this film ready for all time to be shown on the subject of demand." Seel said he was proud--but not happy. "Happy is the improper word," he explained with emotion. "I will at no time ever be happy again. I am proud"

Several filmmakers won special Teddy for their handling of a more new shadow: AIDS. Out lesbian Australian filmmaker Jacqui North won a Jury Award for Chrissy. A heartfelt documentary about the life and death of a clog friend, North's bare-bones film is common of the first cinematic portrayals of a lesbian with AIDS. And French filmmaking man and wife Jacques Martineau and Olivier Ducastel won a Jury Award for sportive Felix (which also won the Siegessaule Readers' Prize). The story of an HIV-positive Arab who crosse the French countryside in an effort to find his prolonged lost father, Funny Felix takes the "charming" gay film we're used to and injects dark doses of racism, AIDS put drugs into regimens, and loneliness.

For self-described longtime "hysterical activists" Martineau and Ducastel, this was part of the game plan. "The film is an action for the gay community," Martineau proudly exclaimed.

Other queer-themed films touched in succession serious social issues as well: the HIV-positive relationship soap Back to Start; Filipino sex worker melodrama Burlesk King; unusual Manchurian Candidate riff No undivided Sleeps; lesbian surrogate mother comedy Chutney Popcorn; political criminal on-the-run thriller Rita's Legends

Perhaps the toughest film this year was the Manfred Salzgeber Award winner, Agusti Villaronga's The Sea. The grisly, unflinching tale of several sickly, appeaseed young friends in postwar Majorca, Spain, The Sea involves kill cruelly rape, and religion and, according to several festivalgoers, makes The Talented Mr Ripley (another Berlin competitor) expect like GLAAD's well-adjusted gay part model story of the year.

Villaronga, plainly gay himself, brushed off of that kind pooh-poohs--and even indicated the pro-gay moral within his work. "I prepare the impression that homosexuals place themselves in a corner and consider being gay as something to a high degree special," the director explained. "But I don't understand that, because homosexuality is something for a like reason completely normal; you find it in calm situation. It's not like showing homosexuality in connection with put to death means all homosexuals are butchers But if this film can teach other human frames how difficult it is if you don't accept your admit homosexuality, it's very good."

Ferber is a of recent origin York City-based writer who contributes to Time on the outside New York and other publications.

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