The Berlin International Film Festival has drawn to a close, and so have the Teddy Awards, the LGBT film skein that runs alongside the main fest. The Teddy gongs have now been handed out, with the Polish movie, W imie… (In the Name of), winning Best Queer Feature, and Sébastien Lifshitz’s Bambi picking up Best Documentary.
They now join the ranks of previous winners including Ira Sachs’ excellent Keep The Lights On, Marco Berger’s Absent, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig And The Angry Inch.
W Imie is about Adam, a Catholic priest who lives in a village in rural Poland where he works with teenagers with behavioural problems who fight and yell abuse. After turning down a woman’s advances, it turns out that celibacy is not the only reason for his rejection. Adam knows that he desires men and that his embrace of the priesthood has been a flight from his own sexuality. When he eventually meets Lukasz, the strange and taciturn son of a simple rural family, Adam’s self-imposed abstinence becomes a heavy burden.
Bambi meanwhile is looks at Marie-Pierre, who was born Jean-Pierre Pruvot in a tiny Algerian village in 1935. Even as a child she refused to meet the expectations of her extended family, choosing instead to find a way to become the woman she always knew herself to be. She movie to Paris in the 1950s, assumed the stage name of ‘Bambi’ and took to the music-hall stages. Now 77 years old, Bambi reveals Marie-Pierre’s story of deep-seated confusion, painful rejection and impassioned courage.
The final prize, for Best Short Film, went to Ta Av Mig (Undress Me), about a man and a woman who meet on the street. The woman is a male-to-female transsexual, who over the course of the film examines our perceptions of gender and how our identity can be formed by the perceptions of others.
You can take a look at trailers for W Imie and Ta Av Mig below (sadly we couldn’t find one for Bambi). [Read more…]