French-Senegalese director Mati Diop's documentary Dahomey, which examines the thorny issue of the return of European looted antiquities to Africa, has won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Kenyan-Mexican Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o announced her selection for the seven-member Golden Bear award at a gala ceremony in the German capital on Saturday.
Diop said the award “honors not just me, but the entire visible and invisible community that this film represents.”
Al Jazeera's Dominic Kane, reporting from Berlin, said the documentary “confronts issues that are at the forefront of many people's minds, not just in the film industry but across Europe.”
“DDahomey concentrates on Benin's bronze medal and the fight to have it returned. The principle of redemption, which is what director Mati Diop referred to when accepting the Golden Bear at this festival.” said Kane.
Hong Sang-soo, a popular figure in the Korean art world, won the runner-up prize for his third collaboration with French film legend Isabelle Huppert, “Traveler's Needs''.
Hong, who frequently attends film festivals, thanked the judges, joking, “I don't know what you saw in this movie.''
French author Bruno Dumont won the third place Jury Prize for “Empire,'' a story about an intergalactic battle between good and evil set in a French fishing village.
Dominican director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias won the best director award for “Pepe,'' a mysterious docudrama about the ghost of a hippopotamus kept by the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. .
Marvel movie star Sebastian Stan chose Silver Bear for his best performance in the American satirical film A Different Man.
Stan plays an actor who suffers from neurofibromatosis, a genetic disease that causes disfiguring tumors, and is cured with a breakthrough treatment.
The Romanian-American star called the film “a story about acceptance, identity, and self-truth, as well as disfigurement and disability, subjects that have long been overlooked by our own prejudices.” .
'collusion'
Britain's Emily Watson won the Silver Bear for best supporting role for her role as a cruel mother in Small Things Like These.
The film, starring Cillian Murphy, is about one of modern Ireland's biggest scandals: the Magdalene Laundry network of Roman Catholic prison workhouses for “depraved women”.
She paid tribute to “thousands of young women whose lives have been destroyed by the collusion of the Irish Catholic Church and the state.”
German writer and director Matthias Glasner won the Silver Bear for best screenplay for his semi-autobiographical tragicomedy Dying. This three-hour masterpiece of his features some of the country's top actors and portrays a dysfunctional family.
The Silver Bear Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution went to Martin Guschlacht, the cinematographer for the Austrian historical horror film The Devil's Baths. It's a story about depressed women who commit murder in order to be executed in the 18th century.
Separately, the Berlin Documentary Award went to the Palestinian-Israeli activist group No Other Land, which depicts Palestinians displaced by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank.
“In accepting the award, the two men most involved in this film, one Israeli and one Palestinian, both spoke of the need for an immediate ceasefire. And that idea was echoed by many others. , that is, people who won awards, [and] Some people give out awards,” Kane said.
Vietnamese director Pham Ngoc Lan's “Cu Li Never Cries'' won the Best First Feature Award. The film tells the story of a woman who returns to Vietnam from Germany with the remains of her estranged husband.
The best short film went to Argentine director Francisco Lezama's “An Odd Turn,'' about a museum security guard who uses a pendulum to predict the rise in the dollar.
The Berlinale, as the festival is known, ranks alongside Cannes and Venice as one of Europe's top film showcases.
Last year, another documentary about a floating day care center for people with mental illness won France's Golden Bear Award for On the Adamant.