Band of Thebes

Berinale Teddy Winner: Brazilian Film About a Gay, Blind 15 Year-Old

Writer-director Daniel Ribeiro's Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho/ The Way He Looks has won the Teddy Award for the best lgbt feature at the 64th Berlin Film Festival. "Giovana is Leo’s best friend. They spend their afternoons at the pool, awarding points for the level of their boredom and just hanging out. But there are limits to their intimacy. Leo is rather self-contained; even his schoolmates’ barbs can’t dent his sense of his own independence. Tired of his parents’ over-protective attitude, this blind fifteen-year-old wants to take control of his own life and apply for a school exchange. The arrival of a new pupil at school prompts Leo to reassess his daily routine. Having made friends with Gabriel he must now find a way to deal with Giovana’s jealousy. And yet, as naturally as Leo becomes aware of his feelings for Gabriel, the more he allows himself to feel unsettled by his friend’s tentative advances."  The jury called it, "A joyous debut feature from a director who combines great writing, characterization, performance, camera, and music to deliver a film that soars above the well-explored coming of age genre, giving new meaning to the old adage ‘love is blind.’"

After the jump, watch the Belle & Sebastian-infused trailer even if your Portuguese isn't grande.

Stefan Haupt won the Teddy's best queer documentary award -- and the Berlinale's audience award for best doc -- for his film Der Kreis/The Circle (below): "Founded in the early 1940s, the network around the magazine Der Kreis was the only gay organisation to survive the Nazi regime. Legendary masked balls in Zurich hosted 800 visitors from all over Europe. It is there that timid teacher Ernst Ostertag falls in love with drag star Röbi Rapp. Ernst searches for a way to fight for his gayness to be accepted as normal outside the boundaries of ‘The Circle’ network without losing his employment as a teacher. The film uncovers the fascinating universe of one of the first gay liberation communities. Enriched by impressive conversational records with Ernst Ostertag and Röbi Rapp, the film depicts a decades-long love story."

Roy Dib won best short for his 19-minute Mondial 2010: "A Lebanese gay couple decides to take a road trip to Ramallah. The film is recorded with their camera as they chronicle their journey. The protagonists and the viewers are invited through the couple’s conversations into the universe of a fading city."

Bruce LaBruce won a Special Jury Award for his 51-minute film Pierrot Lunaire, "A young woman that regularly dresses as a man falls in love and seduces a young girl that has no clue that her lover is of the same sex. When the girl introduces ‘her boyfriend’ to her father he becomes skeptical and unmasks the fraud."

The main Berlinale winners: Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice took two big prizes, best film and best actor for Liao Fan; Richard Linklater won best director for Boyhood; Haru Kuroki won best actress for The Little House; and Dietrich & Anna Brüggemann won best screenplay for Stations of the Cross. Runner up for best film was Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Overlooked at the queer and general awards was Ira Sachs' Love Is Strange, coming later this year.

Failing at Home, American Antigay Zealots Win Overseas

Losing so many recent battles in the US, American antigay Evangelicals are taking their hate to countries with more receptive audiences, especially in Africa, South America, and the former Soviet Union. You know about the meddling in Uganda and Nigeria but did you realize Scott Lively toured fifty cities throughout Russia denouncing gaydom and urging them to criminalize LGBT advocacy. Last week Alex Seitz-Wald (left) reported on the growing export of Evangelical homophobia and today he talked to NPR's the Takeaway. Listen here. 

NYT Op-Ed: "How Latin Culture Got More Gay"

Radcliffe Institute fellow and author of The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of Aids, Hector Carrillo penned this opinion piece for the NYT asking how the recent great strides for lgbt rights in Central and South America -- including Tuesday's judicial ruling that may lead to marriage equality throughout Brazil -- can be reconciled with "the stereotype of Latin culture as a bastion of religiosity and machismo?"

He writes:

"Since the 1970s, protest movements helped end military dictatorships or long periods of one-party rule; this democratic opening empowered left or center-left governments that have strongly emphasized human rights and individual freedom... gay and lesbian activists piggybacked on this wave of democratization.

"The recent expansion of same-sex marriage rights has come about in part through alliances of left-of-center legislative majorities with progressive executives... judges have played an important role in advancing the cause of gay equality, as evidenced this week in Brazil, where the National Council of Justice, which oversees the judiciary, ruled that notary publics may not refuse to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies. (Judicial appeals, or legislative action, could reverse the decision.)

"These achievements were not inevitable; for decades the left, with ideological roots in class struggle, could be as patriarchal and homophobic as the capitalists and soldiers it condemned. So to understand why the politics changed, we must also look to society.

"In the 1990s, I interviewed dozens of Mexicans, straight and gay, in Guadalajara, the country’s second largest city. They spoke about how they wanted their lives to differ from their parents’. Women wanted to be recognized as sexual beings, with legitimate desires and the ability to pursue them. Men felt the old models of machismo were constraining, not empowering. As the anthropologist Matthew Gutmann found in Mexico City around the same time, this was the first generation of Mexicans for whom machismo was a dirty word.

"This desire for individual autonomy — which in some ways lagged behind the sexual revolution in the United States — extended to gay and lesbian people. The emergence of aids as a global epidemic coincided with a period of energetic democratization. Of course, increased visibility generated homophobic reactions, but it also motivated gays to declare their identities and organize politically."

Here's the essay in full.

For more, read these:

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies, Rafeal de la Dehesa

Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America, Matthew Guttmann

Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, Carla Trujillo

Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader

From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction

With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians

Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

Compañeras: Latina Lesbians: an Anthology

Virgins, Guerrillas, and Locas: Gay Latinos Writing about Love

Besame Mucho: An Anthology of Gay Latino Fiction

Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression

Latina Lesbian Writers and Artists

The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Manuel Munoz 

And get the current PEN Faulkner winner Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Only yesterday on FB, Garth "Mitko" Greenwell and Bob "Selfish and Perverse" Smith were raving about the seven wonders in Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. 

Born February 8: James Dean, Elizabeth Bishop

 

Photo by Richard C. Miller, available for $10,350.

Dead at 24, the Hoosier native, the Hollywood icon, James Dean became the first actor to be nominated posthumously for an Oscar in 1955 for East of Eden and is the only actor to be twice nominated after death, the second time for Giant in 1956. That same year saw the publication of his first biography, which, no surprise, was also the first in a long line of books and biopics to degay him, even though it was written by one of his lovers, William Bast. Exactly 50 years later, in 2006, Bast finally came clean about their affair in a second book, Surviving James Dean. Just a few of the many others beyond Bast to say Dean was definitely gay, not bi, or experimenting, or 'confused about his sexuality,' are the director Nicholas Ray, the screenwriter Gavin Lambert, and biographer Paul Alexander, author of Boulevard of Broken Dreams. One book that cheaply sidesteps his homosexuality is George Perry's recent James Dean, nonetheless worthwhile for its photos. He would be 82 today, the same age as Clint Eastwood.

 

Elizabeth Bishop's father died before her first birthday and at five she saw her mother institutionalized for mental illness, from which she never recovered. It is said Elizabeth never again saw her mother, who died eighteen years later, still locked up. Orphaned, Elizabeth grew up happily with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, then unhappily with her other grandparents in Worcester, then with an aunt's family in Revere. In the fall of 1929 she entered Vassar where she later met Marianne Moore. After graduation, an inheritance allowed her to travel and write poetry. She lived in France and shared a house in Key West with a college friend, the stationery heiress Louise Crane (whose father was governor of Massachusetts and a US senator and whose mother was a founder of MoMA). Bishop published her first book of poems, North & South, in 1946 and three years later was Poet Laureate of the United States. In 1951 she set off to go around South America by boat. Expecting to stay in Brazil for two weeks, she stayed seventeen years, thanks to her long relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares. In 1956 Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize, but happy times gave way to depression, tantrums, and alcoholism. Lota killed herself in 1967. Two years later, Bishop won the National Book Award for her Complete Poems. In 1976 she published her final volume of new work and became the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (and she's still the only American to have won it). A lesbian and a self-described feminist, she lived through the 60s and 70s shunning the women's movement and always refused to let her work be included in anthologies of female writers. Her second long-term relationship, with Alice Methfessel, lasted until her death at 68 in 1979. Intelligent readers now have three important places to start with Bishop: her Poems, her Prose, and Michael Sledge's novel The More I Owe You [Kindle], winner of the Ferro Grumley and a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Blond Ambition

  

One of my all-time favorite books, ever, is Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl's account of his 1947 attempt to float five thousand miles across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia. Bucking universal scorn and probable doom, he and five friends built their raft by hand using only materials available to early South Americans. A documentary of their magnificent adventures already won an Oscar in 1951 [clip after the jump]. This week Toronto screens a new feature begging the timeless question, What would you do stuck on a raft for four months with six blond lean-muscled Norwegian men? 

Ira Sachs Wins Teddy Award for Best Queer Film at Berlinale

Congratulations to Ira Sachs whose Keep the Lights On won Best Feature at the 26th Teddy Awards celebrating queer film at the Berlinale. Over ten years, a New York gay couple's relationship is threatened by competing addictions.

Zuschauerpreis der Siegessaeule: The bigger winner might be The Parade [above]. From Serbia, the turbulent farce follows homophobic mafia hitmen forced to defend the flaming queers at a fractious gay pride parade, with additional comedy/conflict among Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo-Albanians and Croatian war vets. The cliche-riddled movie equally lampoons nellie fags and moronic machismo in the name of ultimately affirming gay acceptance. Amazingly, it became a monster box office smash success across the Balkans, becoming the #1 movie of 2011 with double the ticket sales of the number two movie, The Smurfs. The optimistic, solipsistic director expects this year's gay pride parade to be the region's first ever without anti-gay violence, thanks to his movie.

Best Documentary: Call Me Kuchu, a film by Katherine Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worral, about Uganda's first openly gay activist, David Kato, who was murdered. More here.

Best Short: Loxoro. A mother in Peru searches for her teenaged daughter and her best friend, both transsexuals.

Special Jury Prize: Jaures

Special Teddy I & II: Ulrike Ottinger, Mario Montez

As for the main jury prizes at the Berlinale, the Golden Bear went to Caesar Must Die by 80 and 82 year-old brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. (Last year's Golden Bear winner, which also swept the acting awards, was the Iranian drama A Separation. It has an impossible 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and truly is as good as everyone says. See it before it wins on Sunday.)

Brazil's "I Don't Want To Go Back Alone" Wins Iris Prize

The Iris Prize, the world's richest honor for an LGBT short film, has been awarded to I Don't Want To Go Back Alone by Daniel Ribeiro of Brazil. The 16-minute story centers around Leonardo, a blind 15 year-old, who gets a crush on Gabriel, a new boy at his high school and must cope with the jealousy of his best female friend, Giovana.

Andrew Steggall's The Red Bike won Best UK short. Although the Iris Prize was established to honor achievement in queer short filmmaking, since 2008 they have annually named a best feature. This year's winner is August by Eldar Rapaport who took home the Iris two years ago for his short Steam. Now the festival has expanded its honors yet again, to name a best actress and actor in features: Alison Lane won for her work in Going Down in La-La Land [below] and Murray Bartlett won for August.

Celebrate the Elizabeth Bishop Centennial with Three 'New' Books

Forget Reagan. The only 100th birthday worth celebrating this week was Elizabeth Bishop's on February 8. Vexingly, her centenary seems to have inspired a lot of bad writing, and no one has adequately incorporated her lesbian life with her work. Critic and Last Station novelist Jay Parini has an okay but degayed piece in the Guardian. He writes, "She put the world together in a clear and coherent fashion, in a small quantity of perfect poems, such as One Art, a villanelle that perpetually astonishes with its craft and soul: the subject of loss has rarely been so movingly explored, with an off-handedness that belies the ferocious art that makes it possible."

Profiting from the anniversary, FSG has released three Bishop books. The only wholly new work is Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker, a collection of her correspondence with the editors of the magazine that published most of her greatest poems. The NYT says one pleasure of the collection is

"snooping around in the excellent footnotes and front matter for the wicked comments she made behind the magazine’s back. She deplored its “ ‘How nice to be nice!’ atmosphere,” its sense of “false refinement,” and declared that reading the magazine was “getting to be like reading a quilt — eating a quilt, I mean — full of starchy fillers and ‘enough water to properly prepare’ etc.”

FSG has also reissued and repackaged her collected poems and complete prose with a few extras that the NYT says "do not add a great deal to our understanding or enjoyment of Bishop’s work." Not to bemoan our hastening decline but compare the soft, intimate, evocative old covers to these new hamfisted, masculine, sterile, all-cap horrors. The implication is that 'important' work can't look feminine.

(Thanks to reader Jere G. for the Bishop reminder as I was posting from airport lounges.)

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise sinks to a lowly #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [[Kindle]] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and earlier this year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel [below]. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. If you're near New York on January 20, see him at Joe's Pub.

Neither Sinks Nor Floats: Undertow

Congratulations to Peru for choosing Undertow, a gay movie with onscreen, outdoor gay sex, as their official entry for this year's foreign language Oscar. At Sundance last January, it won the World Cinema Audience Award.

In a tradition-bound village, deeply closeted macho fisherman Miguel thinks he can make everyone happy by lying to his unsuspecting, very pregnant wife Mariela and severely limiting blissful contact with his rich, more openly gay painter boyfriend Santiago. He can't, not least because Santiago drowns. Dead, and invisible to everyone but Miguel, Santiago is finally able to walk the village streets arm and arm with his lover, but he's unable to move on from uncomfortable limbo unless Miguel publicly performs a ritualized burial at sea, which would out him to his hostile friends and censorious neighbors. The only questions of the rest of the movie -- Will he or won't he? And what will Mariela do when she finds out? -- unfold slowly and modestly. If the results aren't outright predictable they are certainly expected, limiting their dramatic impact. Improving on the standard arc, for once the wife is not just portrayed as the bad extra, selfishly standing in the way of the husband's truer, better love. Her misery is at least as sympathetic here as Miguel's, who cries a lot in self-pity, still claiming close to the end, "I'm not that way!" The story of his earnest struggle is kept afloat by a series of tiny gracenotes capturing villagers -- the lusty daughter of the town gossip, the shopkeeper, Mariela's withered mother peering out from behind her screened gate -- at their most idiosyncratic and humane.