The Silver Bear Awards for best actress and actor went to Germany’s Paula Beer for her role in Christian Petzold’s Berlin-set love story “Undine,” and Italy’s Elio Germano for Giorgio Diritti’s “Hidden Away,” a portrait of artist Antonio Ligabue.
Italian siblings Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo won the Silver Bear for best screenplay for “Bad Tales,” the Rome-set drama they also directed that follows several families over the course of a fateful summer.
The Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution went to cinematographer Jürgen Jürges for his work on Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel’s Russian-language “Dau. Natasha,” while the newly minted Silver Bear 70th Berlinale went to “Delete History” by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern.
The Silver Bear 70th Berlinale replaced the Alfred Bauer Prize following revelations earlier this year that the award’s namesake and the Berlinale’s first director was much more closely affiliated with the Nazi Party than previously known.
This year marked the beginning of a new era for the festival under the new leadership team of artistic director Carlo Chatrian and executive director Mariette Rissenbeek. One of Chatrian’s main changes to the official section was the introduction of the Encounters section this year. The sidebar’s jury awarded the Encounters Award for best film to the U.S.-Swedish-Japanese-U.K. co-production “The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)” by C.W. Winter and Anders Edström.
