Santiago Loza’s Brief Story From the Green Planet, an odd genre-mixer involving a trio of LGBTQ friends who discover an actual alien sleeping in the house of one of their late grandmother’s, won the Teddy Award for best LGBTQ film screening at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival.
Brief Story also won the best film prize, the Teddy Readers’ Award, sponsored by online site Queer.de.
The pic marks Loza’s third time in Berlin, following Malambo, the Good Man last year and 2013’s La Paz. Brief Story premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama sidebar.
The Teddy for best documentary/essay film went to Joanna Reposi Garibaldi’s Lemebel, a portrait of the late gay Chilean essayist, chronicler and novelist Pedro Lemebel.
A special jury award was given to A Dog Barking at the Moon, the debut feature from Chinese director Xiang Zi, which looks at a dysfunctional family with plenty of skeletons in the closet — among them the father’s same-sex attractions and the mother’s devotion to a Buddha cult.
This year’s special Teddy Award went to German theater director and playwright Falk Richter.
