Dahomey, a documentary by Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop probing the thorny issues surrounding Europe’s return of looted antiquities to Africa, has won the Berlin International Film Festival’s top prize.
Kenyan-Mexican Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o announced the seven-member panel’s choice for the Golden Bear award at a gala ceremony in the German capital Saturday.
Diop said the prize “not only honours me but the entire visible and invisible community that the film represents”.
Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane, reporting from Berlin, said the documentary “confronts an issue that has been the forefront of many people’s minds, not just in the film world but also across Europe.
“DDahomeyconcentrates on the Benin bronzes and the struggle to return those bronzes. The whole principle of restitution, that is what the director Mati Diop referred to in accepting the prize, the Golden Bear at this festival,” Kane said.
South Korean arthouse favourite Hong Sang-soo captured the runner-up Grand Jury Prize for, A Traveller’s Needs, his third collaboration with French screen legend Isabelle Huppert.
Hong, a frequent guest at the festival, thanked the jury, joking, “I don’t know what you saw in this film.”
French auteur Bruno Dumont accepted the third-place Jury Prize for, The Empire, an intergalactic battle of good and evil set in a French fishing village.
Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias won best director for, Pepe, his enigmatic docudrama conjuring the ghost of a hippopotamus owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar.
Marvel movie star Sebastian Stan picked up the best performance Silver Bear for his appearance in the US satire, A Different Man.
Stan plays an actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disease causing disfiguring tumours, who is cured with a groundbreaking medical treatment.
The Romanian American star called it “a story that’s not only about acceptance, identity and self-truth but about disfigurement and disability – a subject matter that’s been long overlooked by our own bias”.
