In year of #MeToo, women win big at Berlin film festival
– “Touch Me Not,” an experimental Romanian docudrama exploring sexual intimacy and the fears around it, won the Golden Bear top prize at the Berlin film festival Saturday, February 24 in a strong year for female filmmakers and women’s stories.
First- time director Adina Pintilie, 38, clutching the trophy after her surprise triumph, said the movie was intended to “invite you, the viewer, to dialogue” with its graphic portrayals of nudity and disability.
US filmmaker Wes Anderson clinched the best director Silver Bear prize for Isle of Dogs,” an animated allegory with political bite and an early favorite among the 19 contenders.
Actor Bill Murray, who voices one of the pack of pooches in Anderson’s first animated feature since 2009’s ‘Fantastic Mr Fox,” picked up the award for Anderson.
“I never thought that I would go to work as a dog and come home with a bear,” he quipped.
“Ich bin ein Berliner Hund (I am a Berlin dog),” he added, riffing on John F. Kennedy’s famous speech.
The runner- up Grand Jur y Prize went to Polish social satire "Mug" by Malgorzata Szumowska, the second winner among 4 women in competition.
It tells the story of a man who is shunned by his community when he has a face transplant after a horrific seum of Anthropology in Mexico City, bagged the best screenplay award.
Austria’s “The Waldheim Waltz” by Ruth Beckermann about the scandal surrounding the Nazi past of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim claimed the best documentary prize.
Despite critical accolades, wrenching drama “U-July 22” about the mass murder of 69 mainly teenage victims on the Norwegian island of Utoya by far-right militant Anders Behring Breivik in 2011, left the ceremony empty-handed.
#MeToo cast shadow