Darkness in Berlin.

This year's gay and lesbian winners at the Berlin International Film Festival prove that queer cinema is ready to get 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 on the Berlin festival's top honor, the Golden Bear--is almost cuddly. Yet the gritty films that won the award in February are anything but. Speaking with The Advocate in Berlin, the winning filmmakers turned out to be as varied as their dark, powerful pictures.

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

Adapted from Fassbinder's stage play, Water Drops portrays a tortured relationship between manipulative older man Leopold (Bernard Giraudeau) and naive, romantic youth Franz (Malik Zidi), which turns 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 such dark comedies as Sitcom and Criminal Lovers, said he shares Fassbinder's sense of "reality and clarity." But there's one crucial difference, he added: "Fassbinder had a sense of guilt; I don't."

Germany's guilt over its Nazi past loomed in several films this year, most prominently in the Best Documentary winner, Paragraph 175. Directed by Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein (1996 Teddy winners for The Celluloid Closet), this groundbreaking, moving documentary recounts Nazi antigay persecution through its few remaining survivors' eyes. At the ceremony Epstein and Friedman confessed that "as Americans, we were nervous about taking a film about German history to Germany." But audiences, the festival jury, and two survivors present--Gad Beck and Pierre Seel--indicated they'd done an honorable job. Indeed, at a party for the film Beck insisted that "in Berlin there must be two or three copies of this film ready for all time to be shown upon demand." Seel said he was proud--but not happy. "Happy is the wrong word," he explained with emotion. "I will never, ever be happy again. I am proud."

Several filmmakers won special Teddys for their handling of a more recent shadow: AIDS. Out lesbian Australian filmmaker Jacqui North won a Jury Award for Chrissy. A heartfelt documentary about the life and death of a close friend, North's bare-bones film is one of the first cinematic portrayals of a lesbian with AIDS. And French filmmaking couple Jacques Martineau and Olivier Ducastel won a Jury Award for Funny Felix (which also won the Siegessaule Readers' Prize). The story of an HIV-positive Arab who crosses the French countryside in an effort to find his long lost father, Funny Felix takes the "charming" gay film we're used to and injects dark doses of racism, AIDS drug 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 on serious social issues as well: the HIV-positive relationship soap Back to Start; Filipino sex worker melodrama Burlesk King; queer Manchurian Candidate riff No One 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, repressed young friends in postwar Majorca, Spain, The Sea involves murder, rape, and religion and, according to several festivalgoers, makes The Talented Mr. Ripley (another Berlin competitor) look like GLAAD's well-adjusted gay role model story of the year.

Villaronga, openly gay himself, brushed off such pooh-poohs--and even indicated the pro-gay moral within his work. "I get the impression that homosexuals put themselves in a corner and consider being gay as something very special," the director explained. "But I don't understand that, because homosexuality is something so completely normal; you find it in even situation. It's not like showing homosexuality in connection with murder means all homosexuals are murderers. But if this film can teach other persons how difficult it is if you don't accept your own homosexuality, it's very good."

Ferber is a New York City-based writer who contributes to Time Out New York and other publications.