Documentary ‘On the Adamant’ Wins Golden Bear for Best Film

The star of 20,000 Species of Bees, Sofía Otero, becomes the youngest-ever winner of Berlin’s Silver Bear for best leading performance.

On the Adamant, a documentary by French director Nicolas Philibert, an intimate look at the patients and caregivers in mental health center located on the Seine River in Paris, has won the 2023 Berlin Film Fest top award, Golden Bear for best film.

Sofía Otero, who plays a girl of 8 who begins to transition in Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s 20,000 Species of Bees, is the youngest-ever winner of the Berlin Film Fest’s Silver Bear for best leading performance.

Dedicated to Godard

Vet French filmmaker Philippe Garrel took Berlin’s Best Director prize for The Plough, a family drama featuring Garrel’s real-life children playing three siblings who are the latest, and perhaps last, generation in a family of puppeteers. Garrel dedicated his award to the late, great French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard.

The runner-up Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize went to Afire from German director Christian Petzold, tragicomedy about four young people in a holiday home on the Baltic coast who are threatened by an encroaching forest fire.

The Silver Bear jury prize went to João Canijo’s Bad Living, is a Portuguese-French film about the conflicts between the five women who run an old hotel.

Thea Ehre took the Silver Bear for best supporting performance in Christoph Hochhäusler’s Till the End of the Night.

“If I’m allowed to speak very plainly, this performance blew our hair back,” Jury President announced the prize. “This person has an aura.”

Berlin was the first major film festival to introduce gender-neutral acting awards and hands out a single prize for best leading performance and one for best supporting performance.

Angela Schanelec’s Music, a modern-day reimagining of the Oedipus myth, told almost entirely without dialog, was the surprise winner of the IBest Screenplay honor.

Veteran cinematographer Helene Louvart has won Berlin’s Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution went to for her luminous lensing of Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut, Disco Boy.

Mexican-based director Tatiana Huezo grabbed two honors early on, taking the best director prize for the Berlinale’s Encounters section, as well as the Berlinale best documentary prize, for her latest film, The Echo, which looks at families living in a remote village in northern Mexico. The documentary award comes with a $42,000 (€40,000) cash prize, shared between the director and the producers of the film.

The Encounters jury, which picked the best films in the Berlinale’s sidebar for more experimental cinema, gave its special jury honor ex aequo to Orlando, My Political Biography from trans writer turned director Paul B. Preciado, and to Samsara from Spanish director Lois Patiño. Orlando film uses Virginia Woolf’s 1928 classic novel Orlando: A Biography to comment on current issues of gender and body-politics. Samsara, set in Laos, follows teenagers are living and studying together in Buddhist temples.

Bas Devos’ Here won the Golden Bear for best film in the Encounters section. The quietly romantic drama follows a construction worker and a scientist who cross paths and start to help one another. Earlier in the day, Here won the Fipresci prize for best film screening in Berlin’s Encounters section.

The prize for best first feature film, which comes with a $52,800 ($50,000) bursary, went to the Austrian-Argentinian drama The Klezmer Projectfrom directors Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, which screened in Berlin’s Encounters program.

The Berlinale Silver Bear short film jury prize went to directors Matthew Thorne and Derik Lynch for their Australian drama Dipped in Black.

The Golden Bear for best short went to Les chenilles from Lebanese directors Michelle and Noel Keserwany.

Berlinale Jury President Kristen Stewart and her jury of five women and two men picked the winners of this year’s Golden and Silver Berlin Bears from the 19 films in competition.

Alongside Stewart, the other members of the Berlinale Competition jury include Iranian-French actress Golshifteh Farahani, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, Spanish director Carla Simón, Hong Kong director Johnnie To, German director Valeska Grisebach, and U.S. casting director Francine Maisler.

Berlin’s Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian and Executive Director Mariëtte Rissenbeek have picked a broad and eclectic mix of movies that have delighted and divided critics in equal measure.

This year’s honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement was given to Steven Spielberg.

You can watch the livestream of the awards ceremony on the Berlinale’s YouTube channel below.