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 the year opened on 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 this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In Italian documentary Into My Name, screening in the Panorama sidebar section, 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.

‘Richness of humanity’

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

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 realise 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 told AFP.

“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 behaviour.

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

Gender-neutral prize

In the Forum section of the Berlinale, Brazilian offering 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.

In another nod to a non-binary future, the festival will this year for the second time award a gender-neutral best acting prize, 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.”

With Into My Name, Bassetti wants to show people they do not have to submit to “the performance of masculinity or femininity”, codes of behaviour that have “become more questionable to many people”.

“There really is just one human race and we all belong to that,” he said.