The highest prize at this yr’s Berlin Worldwide Movie Pageant was given to “Dahomey,” a documentary by the French filmmaker Mati Diop about 26 looted artworks that have been returned to Benin from France in 2021.
The unconventional function, narrated partly by the gravelly, imagined voice of one of many artworks, is a playful exploration of the legacy of colonialism and the interaction between historical past and id in present-day Benin. It’s Diop’s first function since “Atlantics,” a drama about Senegalese migrants that gained the Grand Prix on the Cannes Movie Pageant in 2019.
In Diop’s acceptance speech for the prize, referred to as the Golden Bear, she mentioned that “Dahomey” was a part of the “collapsing wall of silence” round the necessity to return artworks looted by colonial powers to their authentic house owners. “We will both eliminate the previous as an imprisoning burden,” she mentioned, “or we will take duty for it.”
This yr’s jury was led by the Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o and included the German director Christian Petzold, whose movie “Afire” gained the runner-up prize eventually yr’s pageant in Berlin, and the Spanish director Albert Serra.
This yr’s runner-up prize was introduced to “A Traveler’s Wants,” by the prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, who additionally gained awards at three of the final 5 editions of the occasion. His usually understated movie stars Isabelle Huppert as an eccentric Frenchwoman who has a sequence of encounters in Seoul.
The Particular Jury Prize was given to “The Empire,” a critically divisive, visually lavish satire of “Star Wars” by the director Bruno Dumont set in a French coastal city.
The most effective director award went to Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias for “Pepe,” one of many pageant’s strangest entries, a few hippopotamus as soon as owned by the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The gender-neutral greatest efficiency award went to the actor Sebastian Stan for his work in “A Totally different Man,” during which he performs a person who undergoes a process for his facial disfigurement.
The Silver Bear for greatest screenplay went to Matthias Glasner, the German writer-director of “Dying,” a drama a few household grappling with parental mortality. The most effective supporting efficiency award went to Emily Watson for her function as a sinister Irish nun in “Small Issues Like These.”
This yr’s pageant, referred to as the Berlinale in Germany, is the final to be headed by Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, who took over twin management of the pageant in 2019 with the objective of elevating its profile. A lot of the dialogue across the present occasion has centered on whether or not they have delivered on their mandate.
The competitors lineup featured a mix of Berlinale mainstays, together with Sang-soo and the German director Andreas Dresen, together with extra esoteric and explicitly political movies from international locations corresponding to Iran. However many critics complained that the lineup was extra uneven and fewer daring than those in earlier years. On the midpoint of the pageant, Susan Vahabzadeh of the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote in German that the “density of actually profitable movies had not been excessive.”
Others complained that regardless of appearances by Adam Sandler and Kristen Stewart, the present occasion lacked star energy. In The New York Occasions, the critic Jessica Kiang wrote that the pageant had “not often felt this embattled and unstable, or uncertain of itself.”
It units the stakes for Tricia Tuttle, an American who beforehand led the London Movie Pageant and who in April will take the helm of the Berlinale, the biggest movie pageant on the earth by viewers quantity. Along with attracting top-level expertise, she must steer the pageant by a deadly monetary and political local weather.
At a information convention asserting her appointment in December, Tuttle mentioned that her objective was to steadiness “established filmmakers” with “underrepresented voices,” however famous that the difficulties dealing with the Berlinale weren’t distinctive. “The previous few years have been difficult for each pageant,” she mentioned.
