From Left: Actors Khalil Ben Gharbia and Denis Menochet and director Francois Ozon arrive for the Peter von Kant premiere at the 72nd Berlinale film festival on February 10, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. Photo: VCG

From a gender reversal to an intimate documentary about the lives of transgender people, the 72nd Berlinale film festival offers some new visions on what it means to be a man or a woman.

Europe's first major film festival of 2022 opened Thursday with Francois Ozon's Peter von Kant, a gender-flipped adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1972 movie The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

And the gender-bending theme will continue throughout the 11 days of the festival, taking place in a truncated format in 2022 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In Italian documentary Into My Name, screening in the Panorama sidebar section, well-known director Nicolo Bassetti follows the lives of four friends in Bologna at various stages of the transition from female to male.

Nicolo, Leonardo, Andrea and Raffaele talk intimately about their lives, childhood experiences, partners and the process of transitioning, and dream of one day going on a hiking trip together.

Elliot Page, the Oscar-nominated star of Juno who came out as transgender in 2020, was enlisted as an executive producer on the film.

'Richness of humanity'

Bassetti, inspired by his own transgender son Matteo, 27, said his aim was to depict a "sense of the richness of humanity, especially if you don't see it through binary lenses." 

The process made him realize that "I really had to stop trying to make assumptions about what it is to be a man or a woman and... what it is to be heterosexual or homosexual," Bassetti said. 

"These distinctions are really outmoded and not applicable anymore," he said, adding that he instead "tried to see the beauty" in transgender people. 

Also showing in the Panorama section are Swing Ride and Beautiful Beings, two more films that offer a new perspective on gender norms.

In Swing Ride, an Italian film directed by Chiara Bellosi, a 15-year-old girl has her horizons broadened when she meets a fairground worker named Amanda who refuses to conform to gender stereotypes.

Beautiful Beings, an Icelandic film written and directed by Gudmundur Arnar Gudmundsson, explores the damage that can be caused by rigid masculine codes of behavior.

Young misfit Balli, 14, meets three boys, but their new friendship threatens to turn ugly as they are drawn down a dark road in a world saturated with toxic masculinity.

Non-binary future

In the Forum section, Brazilian film Three Tidy Tigers Tied a Tie Tighter follows the lives of three young non-conforming queer friends during a fictional future pandemic in Sao Paolo.

And in the Generation 14plus category, Portuguese short film At Sixteen explores the desire and insecurity sparked in a teenage protagonist when she sees two girls kissing each other.

In another nod to a non-binary future, the festival will for the second time award a gender-neutral best acting prize in 2022, doing away with the distinction between men and women.

For Bassetti, the division of people into fixed genders is "really just a period in human history," one that is transitory and "by no means what it's always been like." 

"Obviously you can allude to Greek myth with its many variations on non-binary understandings of how the sexes work," he said.

"But there are many other examples in other cultures that are not as strictly binary as we in western Europe have been for the past few hundred years or so."

AFP