The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival went to “Dahomey,” a documentary by French Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop about 26 looted artworks that were restored to Benin from France in 2021.
The unique feature, delivered in part by the gravelly, imagined voice of one of the artworks, is a fun investigation of colonialism’s impact and the interaction of history and identity in contemporary Benin. It’s Diop’s first film since “Atlantics,” a drama about Senegalese migrants that received the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
In her acceptance speech for the Golden Bear Award, Diop stated that “Dahomey” was part of the “collapsing wall of silence” surrounding the need to return artworks looted by colonial governments to their rightful owners. “We can either get rid of the past as an imprisoning burden,” she went on to say, “or we can take responsibility for it.”
This year’s jury was led by Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o and featured German filmmaker Christian Petzold, whose film “Afire” was runner-up at last year’s Berlin festival, and Spanish director Alberto Serra.
This year’s runner-up prize was handed to “A Traveler’s Needs” by prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, who had won honors at three of the event’s previous five editions. Isabelle Huppert stars in his typically modest picture as an eccentric Frenchwoman who meets several people in Seoul.
The Special Jury Prize was awarded to “The Empire,” filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s contentious, visually spectacular spoof of “Star Wars” set in a French coastal hamlet.
Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias won the best director prize for “Pepe,” one of the festival’s oddest entries about a hippopotamus once owned by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Sebastian Stan received the gender-neutral best performance award for his role in “A Different Man,” in which he portrays a guy undergoing a surgery for his facial deformities.
The Silver Bear for best script was awarded to Matthias Glasner, the German writer-director of “Dying,” a drama about a family dealing with parental mortality. Emily Watson received the best supporting performance award for her work as a nasty Irish nun in “Small Things Like These.”
Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, who took over dual leadership of the Berlinale festival in 2019 with the intention of expanding its visibility, will oversee the festival for the last time. The recent situation has sparked debate over whether they fulfilled their mandate.
The competition roster included a mix of Berlinale veterans like Sang-soo and German filmmaker Andreas Dresen, as well as more obscure and blatantly political pictures from nations like Iran. However, many commentators observed that the lineup was more uneven and subdued than in prior years. At the halfway point of the festival, Susan Vahabzadeh of the Süddeutsche Zeitung noted in German that the “density of truly successful films had not been high.”
While Adam Sandler and Kristen Stewart made appearances, some critics felt the event lacked star power. Jessica Kiang, a critic of The New York Times, commented that the festival “rarely felt this embattled and unstable, or unsure of itself.”
It raises the stakes for Tricia Tuttle, an American who previously managed the London Film Festival and will take over as director of the Berlinale in April, the world’s largest film festival by audience size. In addition to enticing outstanding artists, she will have to navigate the festival through a difficult financial and political environment.
Tuttle stated at a news conference announcing her appointment in December that her goal was to combine “established filmmakers” with “underrepresented voices,” but acknowledged that the Berlinale’s challenges were not unique. “The last few years have been challenging for every festival,” she went on to say.