Dahomey, a documentary by French-Senegalese director Mati Diop that investigates the thorny issues surrounding Europe's return of looted antiquities to Africa, won the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Kenyan-Mexican Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o announced the selection of the seven-member panel for the Golden Bear award at a gala ceremony in the German capital on Saturday.
Diop said the award “honors not only 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 on the minds of many people, not only in the world of cinema but also across Europe.
“DDahomey is focused on the Benin bronzes and the fight to return them. The whole principle of restitution, that's what director Mati Diop referred to when accepting the award, the Golden Bear, at this festival,” Kane said.
South Korean arthouse favorite Hong Sang-soo took second place in the Grand Jury Prize for A Traveller's Needs, his third collaboration with French film legend Isabelle Huppert.
Hong, a frequent festival guest, thanked the jury and joked, “I don't know what you saw in this movie.”
French author Bruno Dumont accepted the jury's third prize for The Empire, an intergalactic battle between good and evil set in a French fishing village.
Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias won the best director award for Pepe, his enigmatic docudrama that evokes the ghost of a hippopotamus owned by the late Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar.
Marvel movie star Sebastian Stan won the Silver Bear for best performance for his appearance in the American satire, A Different Man.
Stan plays an actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disease that causes disfiguring tumors, which is cured with an innovative medical treatment.
The Romanian-American star called it “a story that is not only about acceptance, identity and personal truth, but also about disfigurement and disability, a topic that has long been overlooked by our own prejudices.”
'Collusion'
Britain's Emily Watson won the Silver Bear for best supporting performance for her portrayal of a cruel Mother Superior in Small Things Like These.
The film, starring Cillian Murphy, is about one of modern Ireland's biggest scandals: the Magdalene Laundry network of Roman Catholic prisons for “fallen women”.
He paid tribute to the “thousands and thousands of young women whose lives were devastated by the collusion between the Catholic Church and the State in Ireland”.
German screenwriter and director Matthias Glasner won the Silver Bear for best screenplay for his semi-autobiographical tragicomedy Dying. The three-hour tour de force features some of the country's best actors portraying a dysfunctional family.
The Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution went to cinematographer Martin Gschlacht for the chilling Austrian historical horror film The Devil's Bath. It tells the story of depressed women in the 18th century who murdered to be executed.
Another Berlinale documentary award went to a Palestinian-Israeli activist collective for No Other Land, about Palestinians displaced by Israeli troops and settlers in the occupied West Bank.
“In accepting the award, the two men most involved in this film – an Israeli and a Palestinian – spoke about the need for an immediate ceasefire, and that is a thought shared by many other people – some award winners, [and] Some people present awards,” Kane said.
Cu Li Never Cries, by Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Ngoc Lan, won the award for best debut film. The film tells the story of a woman who returns to Vietnam from Germany with the ashes of her ex-husband.
The award for best short film went to An Odd Turn, by Argentinian Francisco Lezama, about a museum security guard who predicts an increase in the value of the dollar with a pendulum.
The Berlinale, as the festival is known, ranks alongside Cannes and Venice among the main film exhibitions in Europe.
Last year, another documentary took the Golden Bear, the French film On the Adamant, about a floating daycare for people with psychiatric problems.
