This year’s Golden Bear for best feature film at the Berlin International Film Festival was awarded last Saturday to Synonyms, a dryly comic, largely autobiographical drama about a young Israeli trying to reinvent himself in modern-day Paris.
It was one of 16 films in competition at the festival, seven of which were directed by women.
In his acceptance speech, Nadav Lapid, the film’s Israeli director, dedicated the award to his mother, who edited much of the film but died during production. The selection committee was headed by French actress Juliette Binoche.
Angela Schanelec of Germany took home the directing award for I Was At Home, But, an elliptical film about a widowed mother whose teenage son runs away from home.
In one of the most dramatic moments of this year’s festival, One Second, a drama by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou that is set during the Cultural Revolution, was removed from competition days before its planned premiere for “technical reasons”, a term frequently used in China as a euphemism for government censorship. Read more
