CHROMA

While not as centrally queer as Orlando, Rage is deeply concerned with that queerest of themes: what we say of ourselves and what (secretly) we cannot say but long to. Its compassion is amplified by its stunningly simple visual style; shot in tiny photographers’ studios using greenscreen, the film is also a message to budding filmmakers who think their projects are unlikely to get funding. Potter, a friend of Derek Jarman’s, is one of the few filmmakers committed to his mission of: make things with what you have. That ambition and excitement has been visible in a few other films at the festival, notably Kan Door Huid Heen (Can Go Through Skin), a first feature from Dutch director Esther Rots. Shot in a freezing dilapidated cottage in Zeeland, it’s not a Teddy film because its protagonists are straight, but its attention to bodily detail – both pleasure and disgust – and to the wayward paths of desire is definitely queer to me.

Of the other few Competition films with Teddy qualities, I was most excited about The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Rebecca Miller’s adaptation of her own novel. I loved Pippa in the book, the story of her self-invention as a perfect housewife to contain the chaos of her own desires, which include an SM relationship with her aunt’s girlfriend. Hearing that Julianne Moore was playing the saucy writer Kat, I was even more excited. But the film – conscious, no doubt, of the wider and more conservative audience that a film has to lay claim to in order to get a budget – plays that disturbingly erotic relationship for laughs, just one of the ways that the force of the book is blunted. Still, a newly-slender and shirtless Keanu is a pansexual delight.

But the most beautiful people on show, for me, were in two documentaries with a difference, my nominees for the Teddy. Greyson’s Fig Trees, a project eight years in the making, riffs on Gertrude Stein’s famous opera Four Saints in Three Acts to document the ongoing lives of two AIDS activists, Tim McCaskell from Canada, and Zackie Achmat from South Africa. Queering the idea of saints, Greyson weaves together an operatic meditation with an immense number of intellectual, philosophical, erotic, linguistic, and eccentric strands (something I loved in Rage as well). From the anal resonances of Stein’s “pigeons on the grass, alas” (helps if you say it in an American accent), through the resonance of TB-stricken opera heroines for PWA, to the astonishing beauties of the human voice and the body from which it emerges, Greyson’s film overflows with life that’s impossible to summarize. Sometimes the screen is split into five or six images to (not) contain it. Woven through the film, though, is a central contrast between community-based activism and its transnational connections, and corporate “social responsibility” as a kinder, softer, more fashionable globalisation. The film renames Bono’s (RED) campaign (PINK) and savagely and brilliantly attacks its hypocrisies. Another film for the sponsors to love.

Blame Canada! as someone once said so wisely. Also for the wicked five-minute short The Island by Albertan filmmaker Trevor Anderson. After an interminable shorts program (anyone looking for the new New Brutalist cinema, it’s going to come from Ukraine and it’s going to make The Death of Mr. Lazarescu look like Scrubs), The Island came as a brisk eye-refresher as Anderson walks across an endless snow prairie while his voice-over meditates on an email he received from the US suggests that he and all the faggots move to an island and infect each other with AIDS. Through animation, said island is duly imagined. Like Greyson, Anderson refuses the sentimentalities that would have him say, “Oh, and we’d never infect each other with AIDS!” Instead, he imagines PWA celebrated, feasted, and honoured. The fantasy collapses – “lonely” says Anderson, stranded in the snow – but the film still sent me out zinging.

The film opens on the Palestinian side of the Wall in Ramallah, following a group of young guys climbing over. Risking their lives to go dancing, you could say. But they’re climbing over to be somewhere they can be their whole selves in public, with friends. That’s a rare space anywhere in the world, and Shushan was something of a miracle. Sa’ar, the city councillor who opened the bar, is one of the film’s six subjects, but the doc is balanced so that you don’t feel he’s more important than the amazing people who make up his clientele and community.

It’s clear that Suh fell in love with kohl-eyed, languid, gorgeous Boody, who leads his merry band from Ramallah to Shushan and performs there as Miss Haifa. A devout Muslim who has utterly reconciled his faith and his sexuality, he’s almost too perfect a subject to be true. The same could be said of Samira and Ravit, a Palestinian and an Israeli, living in lesbian doctor bliss. Utterly committed to each other (although both flirting with Suh behind the camera) but under no illusions about the complexity of their situation – in that Ravit wants children, and Samira doesn’t – Samira and Ravit win this Berlinale’s Lesbian Idol hands down.

The competition’s pretty thin. Wrassling it out for most disappointing films of the festival, for me, would be a reprise of the lesbian killer motif in Lucía Puenzo’s El Niño Pez (adapted from her own novel) and Julie Delpy’s The Countess. Delpy plays Erzebet Bathory, the Hungarian countess notorious for bathing in the blood of virgin girls. There’s an Ann-Marie Macdonald play that turns this legend into a passionate lesbian horror romance, but this is not that film. Delpy’s Erzebet is bisexual, forming a close relationship with Darvoulia, her apothecary – beautifully played by the luminous Anamaria Marinca – although the passion that counts is for men. But the film suggests, in its slightly inarticulate way, that that’s because of the patriarchal trap that pincers Erzebet as a powerful woman who can pick and choose lovers at will, but is dependent on them for her sense of self. Darvoulia is the only voice of reason once the murders begin – a refreshing change as the film initially suggests that she will kill Erzebet’s young lover (puppy-faced Daniel Brühl in the Keanu Reeves role) out of jealousy.