WELLESLEY FILMMAKER WINS A TEDDY AWARD
by MAUREEN DEZELL, GLOBE STAFF
February 22, 2002
Page: D4 Section: Living
Wellesley’s Daniel Stedman, 23, flew back to Logan late Tuesday from the Berlin Film Festival, where he won a Teddy, the prestigious festival’s award for gay- and lesbian-themed films. The youngest filmmaker invited to this year’s festival, Stedman garnered the honor for “Celebration,” a bittersweet four-minute movie about a coming-out ceremony for a 6-year-old boy.
The fledgling filmmaker, who graduated from Bates College in Maine with a degree in physics last spring, was thrilled about his win and by the hoopla that came with it. Known in Berlin as the “gay Oscar,” the Teddys are bestowed by German celebrities at “a real-deal awards ceremony” attended by 3,000 people, according to Stedman. Needless to say, it’s followed by a great big party. “Celebration” was screened at the 1,000-seat Zoo Palast theater, where many in the audience burst into laughter and applause when the 6-year-old celebrant, standing at a podium, utters one of the movie’s two lines: “I am a homosexual.” The viewers’ enthusiasm was particularly gratifying to Stedman. “There was a little controversy surrounding my film, because I’m actually straight. It’s just a film that poses a lot of questions,” says Stedman, who’s off tonight on a red-eye flight to California, where “Celebration” will be screened at Cinequest in San Jose.
He’s been invited to “a whole slew of other festivals” but is likely to skip many of them. He and a friend, producer Thomas Haydn, have just formed Dezember Productions, and are gearing up to make a feature film about township jazz, a Harlem Renaissance-like genre centered in Sophiatown in the 1960s, in apartheid-era Africa.
