The high prize at this 12 months’s Berlin International Film Festival went to “Dahomey,” a documentary by French Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop about 26 looted artefacts that had been returned from France to Benin in 2021.
The unconventional function, narrated by the solemn, imagined voice of one of many artworks, is a playful exploration of the interaction between the legacy of colonialism and historical past and identification in present-day Benin. It is Diop’s first function movie since “Atlantics,” a drama about Senegalese immigrants that received the Grand Prix on the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
In Diop’s acceptance speech for the award, generally known as the Golden Bear, he mentioned that “Dahomey” was a part of a “crumbling wall of silence” round the necessity to return artefacts looted by colonial powers to their unique homeowners. “We can both do away with the previous as a burden of imprisonment,” she mentioned, “or we are able to take accountability for it.”
This 12 months’s jury was led by Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o and included German director Christian Petzold, whose movie “Affair” received the runner-up prize finally 12 months’s competition in Berlin, and Spanish director Albert Serra .
This 12 months’s runner-up award was offered to “A Traveler’s Needs” by famend Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, who had additionally received awards in three of the 5 earlier editions of the occasion. In her sometimes understated movie, Isabelle Huppert performs an eccentric French lady who has a number of encounters in Seoul.
The Special Jury Prize went to “The Empire,” a critically divisive, visually attractive satire of “Star Wars” set in a French coastal city from director Bruno Dumont.
The finest director award went to Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias for “Pepe,” one of many competition’s strangest entries, a few hippopotamus that was as soon as owned by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The gender-neutral finest efficiency award went to actor Sebastian Stan for his work in “A Different Man”, by which he performs a person who undergoes a process to disfigure his face.
The Silver Bear for finest screenplay went to German writer-director Matthias Glasner for “Dying,” a drama about a family dealing with the loss of life of a mum or dad. The Best Supporting Performance award went to Emily Watson for her position as a sinister Irish nun in “Small Things Like These”.
This 12 months’s competition, generally known as Berlinale in Germany, is the final to be chaired by Mariette Riesenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, who took over twin management of the competition in 2019 with the purpose of elevating its profile. Many discuss current events The focus is on whether or not he has fulfilled his mandate.
The competitors lineup included a mixture of Berlin mainstays, together with Sang-soo and German director Andreas Dressen, in addition to extra esoteric and overtly political movies from nations resembling Iran. But many critics complained that the lineup was extra uneven and fewer adventurous than earlier years. Amidst the celebration, Susanne Vahabzadeh of Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote in German that “The density of really successful films was not high.,
Others complained that regardless of the presence of Adam Sandler and Kristen Stewart, the present occasion lack of star power, In The New York Times, critic Jessica Kiang wrote that the competition included “Rarely has it felt confused and unstable, or unsure of itself.,
It units the stakes for Tricia Tuttle, an American who beforehand led the London Film Festival and who in April will lead the Berlinale, the world’s largest movie competition by audiences. In addition to attracting top-level expertise, they need to navigate the competition by way of a harmful monetary and political surroundings.
At a press convention saying his appointment in December, Tuttle mentioned that his purpose was to stability “established filmmakers” with “underrepresented voices”, however added that the difficulties confronted by the Berlinale weren’t distinctive. . “The previous few years have been difficult for each competition,” he mentioned.
