Related Posts
The COVID-19 pandemic may still retain an ongoing presence throughout the globe, but that hasn’t stopped the international film scene from attempting a return to normality. While the United States has only recently started to reopen their movie theaters and resume film production (and even then, many argue that it’s still unsafe to do so, with some states remaining adamant about keeping theaters closed), the rest of the world seems to be a bit more confident in terms of how well it has brought the Coronavirus under control. While measures to prevent further disease spread remain in place, many parts of Europe and Asia have made significant progress in getting their film industries back to normal. This includes their various film festivals, and one that has recently attracted an unexpected amount of attention is the upcoming Berlin International Film Festival.
Expected to be held between February 11th and February 21st of next year (assuming that the pandemic doesn’t interfere in any way), the Berlin International Film Festival will be one of the earliest venues for various films from across the globe to make their debut. As it has in almost every prior year, the festival will hand out a single Golden Bear for the picture that is deemed Best Film, as well as several Silver Bears in a variety of smaller categories. Unlike prior years however, some awards have been either retired or compressed into single awards. For one thing, the Alfred Bauer Prize, named after one of the festival’s founders, will no longer be given out. This decision came after revelations that Bauer was involved with the Nazi Party during the 1930’s and 1940’s, serving as a prominent member of the Party’s filmmaking bureaucracy.
However, the change that garnered the most attention was the festival’s decision to forego separate acting awards for male and female actors. Instead, these awards will be replaced with new Silver Bears for Best Leading Performance and Best Supporting Performance that do not discriminate by gender. According to the heads of the festival, Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, the decision was made to reflect on the increasing demand for gender equality in the film industry, claiming that “not separating the awards in the acting field according to gender [is] a signal for a more gender-sensitive awareness in the film industry.”
By combining the acting awards and no longer distinguishing them by gender, the festival has not only enforced the idea that performances by male and female actors can be equivalent and do not need to be separated from one another, but also made the award more accessible to actors whose gender identity is nonbinary. Because there is a growing number of actors that do not consider themselves either a man or a woman, there is concern that nominating such actors for awards is difficult without placing them into a category that does not match their gender identity. By eliminating the gender factor, the Berlin International Film Festival has made this issue nonexistent, meaning that actors of any gender identity are now capable of competing without the threat of discrimination.
Although the festival’s decision has been deemed as a groundbreaker by many, this is not the first time an award ceremony has removed gender from its awards categories. In 2017, the MTV Movie and Television Awards reintroduced the Best Performance in a Movie award, which combined the male and female acting categories into a single award (it had also done this during the 2006 and 2007 ceremonies, but returned to separate male and female categories the following year). As the awards are decided through online voting (predominantly by those in MTV’s target teenage/young adult demographics), the MTV Movie and TV Awards have a respectable following, but do not hold the same level of merit and respectability as more prominent festivals and awards. The Berlin International Film Festival, on the other hand, holds much greater prestige in the awards circuit, so its decision to remove gender from its acting categories could set a new precedent, with other festivals possibly considering a similar decision.
While this decision has been mostly lauded, some people have expressed concern for potential gender bias in the long run. Despite male, female, and nonbinary actors now being able to compete amongst one another, there is worry that voters will be inclined to repeatedly vote in favor of one specific gender over another. If this happens, then an award that should be open to all genders may repeatedly end up going to one single gender, which would render the purpose of this single category all but pointless. If there is one benefit to the current separation of acting awards, it’s that it does allow both male and female actors a guaranteed opportunity to compete, a condition that may not be as easy to uphold when reducing the categories to a single award.
One possible solution to this issue is to preserve male and female categories, but also to introduce an award for performances by nonbinary actors. There are two problems with this solution however. For one thing, nonbinary actors at the moment have so little presence onscreen that it may be difficult to select nominees that best demonstrate the finest acting of a particular year. This could be solved through an increase in nonbinary casting, but given the current state of the film industry would be difficult to execute. Second, separating nonbinary actors from male and female actors would still create a sense of “otherness” that could inadvertently deem nonbinary actors as less worthy.
Still, this is all hypothetical, and while reducing the acting awards to non-gender-discriminatory categories isn’t completely foolproof, this decision is still commendable. At the end of the day, the Berlin International Film Festival is doing everything in its power to push for gender equality in the film industry, and hopefully other institutions will start to follow suit in the near future.
