“Dahomey,” a documentary by French-Senegalese director Mati Diop that explores the thorny points surrounding the European return of looted antiquities to Africa, gained the highest prize on the Berlin Movie Pageant on Saturday.
Issued on:
3 minutes
Kenyan-Mexican Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, the primary black jury president on the 74th annual occasion, introduced the seven-member panel’s selection from 20 contenders for the Golden Bear throughout a gala ceremony.
Diop mentioned the award “honors not solely me, but in addition your entire seen and invisible neighborhood that the movie represents.
“To rebuild we should first recuperate, and what does restitution imply? To recuperate is to do justice,” she added.
South Korean arthouse favourite Hong Sang-soo gained the second Grand Jury Prize for “A Traveller’s Wants,” his third collaboration with French movie legend Isabelle Huppert.
Hong, a frequent visitor on the 11-day competition, thanked the jury and joked, “I do not know what you noticed on this film.”
French writer Bruno Dumont took third place from the jury for ‘The Empire’, an intergalactic battle between good and evil set in a French fishing village.
Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias gained greatest director for “Pepe,” his enigmatic docudrama that evokes the ghost of a hippopotamus owned by the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
![art24](https://s.france24.com/media/display/ac386aa4-cb2d-11ee-b7ef-005056a90284/w:980/p:16x9/m:"brand":"FRANCE24","lang":"EN","program":"","cartouche":"arts24","hash":"47e0a7d4ee76818d8202d810c07f35f5a979194a6b6dd8abbd35f9a117092940","title":"74th%20Berlinale%20festival%20preview","id":"25aba80c-45fb-11ec-90e2-005056bf30b7"/DLS%20AFF%20FOND%20CINEMA%20AFF%20berlinale-2024_frame_457.png)
‘Collusion’
Marvel film star Sebastian Stan was awarded greatest function Silver Bear for his efficiency within the American satire ‘A Totally different Man’.
Stan performs an actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic illness that causes disfiguring tumors, which is cured with a groundbreaking medical therapy.
The Romanian-American heartthrob referred to as it “a narrative that isn’t solely about acceptance, identification and self-truth, but in addition about deformity and incapacity – a subject lengthy neglected on account of our personal prejudices.”
Britain’s Emily Watson gained greatest supporting actress, Silver Bear, for her flip because the merciless Mom Superior in “Small Issues Like These.”
The movie starring Cillian Murphy is about one in every of fashionable Eire’s largest scandals: the Magdalene Laundries community of Roman Catholic penitentiary workhouses for ‘fallen ladies’.
She paid tribute to the “hundreds and hundreds of younger ladies whose lives have been destroyed by the conspiracy between the Catholic Church and the state in Eire”.
German writer-director Matthias Glasner gained the Silver Bear for greatest screenplay for his semi-autobiographical tragicomedy Dying, a three-hour tour de power from among the nation’s greatest actors depicting a dysfunctional household.
The Silver Bear for Excellent Creative Contribution was awarded to cinematographer Martin Gschlacht for the chilling Austrian historic horror movie “The Satan’s Bathtub”, about depressed ladies within the 18th century who kill to be executed.
A separate Berlinale Documentary Award went to a Palestinian-Israeli activist collective for ‘No Different Land’, about Palestinians displaced by Israeli troops and settlers within the West Financial institution.
Most of the award winners, together with Diop, criticized the struggle in Gaza from the rostrum and referred to as for a direct ceasefire.
‘Some type of miracle’
Diop’s smooth, dreamy movie follows the 2021 journey of 26 treasured artifacts from the Dahomey Kingdom to Benin from a museum in Paris.
Within the movie, one of many pictures has Diop narrating in a haunting voiceover in Fon language about his nation being plundered by the French, the circumstances of his personal exile and his eventual repatriation on the Cotonou Museum.
Upon arrival of the gathering, native college students debate the historic significance of the restitution gesture and whether or not it’s a trigger for pleasure or outrage in fascinating, unscripted scenes.
The New York Occasions referred to as the documentary “a type of miracle, packing a rare quantity of data, analysis and wild, compelling creativeness into a brief 68-minute working time.”
Selection mentioned that “Dahomey” was a “hanging, shifting instance of the poetry that may emerge when the useless and the dispossessed communicate to and thru the residing.”
Diop’s supernatural Netflix drama “Atlantics” made her the primary Black lady to compete at Cannes in 2019, when she took residence the second Grand Prix prize.
Whereas she acknowledged the significance of restitution, Diop informed AFP in the course of the competition that she had no intention of “celebrating” French President Emmanuel Macron’s gesture.
Solely 26 artifacts have been returned “in opposition to the greater than 7,000 works nonetheless held captive” in Paris, she famous.
(AFP)