For the second year running, Berlin's biggest prize went to a documentary. The jury, chaired for the first time by an African-born woman—actress Lupita Nyong'o—awarded the Golden Bear to Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop for Dahomey. It's fitting. A film that thoughtfully examines colonialism's legacy deserves the honor. Part fable, part public debate, Dahomey centers on the return to Benin (a West African nation) of twenty-six artworks stolen during the French colonial era. One of the statues speaks in the first person, narrating its journey home—a voice rising from the darkness of the past to reclaim its identity and welcome its old/new dwelling. The film's second half opens space for conversations among young Beninese people, gathered after the restitution to grapple with the recovery of tradition and all that colonialism took. They debate in French, which itself becomes a wound—colonialism didn't return the language. Diop gives voice to both the past of the statues and the present of these young people in a dialogue that seems impossible yet fruitful, bridging the artistic representation of an ancient people and the political voice of a contemporary generation asking who they are.
Two English-speaking actors took the stage at the Berlinale Palast to collect Silver Bears for acting. Emily Watson won for a brief but searing role as a nun—symbol of one of Irish Catholicism's darkest chapters—in Small Things Like These. In a crucial scene, she confronts the lead character with cruel indifference behind a cordial smile, finally pushing him to act for someone else. Sebastian Stan, honored for A Different Man, took the stage to thank director Aaron Schimberg and co-star Adam Pearson for trusting him to portray disability—first from the inside, then from without.
A separate jury awarded its prize to the best documentary: No Other Land, directed by a collective of four filmmakers—two Palestinian, two Israeli—was among this festival's most anticipated films in a year marked by constant references to the Gaza conflict. But it was shot in Masafer Yatta, in the southern West Bank. Joining Palestinian perspective with Israeli activism, it documents the Israeli military's campaign to uproot Palestinians from their land under the guise of military necessity. The injustice is plain. The needless cruelty of Israeli soldiers is visible. So is the anguish of children watching their schools and playgrounds destroyed. Yet the film itself asks: what can cinema actually change? If the goal was public awareness, or pressure on the Israeli government, success seems unlikely. In Berlin, the controversy was fierce. After the screening, the Palestinian director said he rejected the festival's stance on Gaza. Chants for Palestine broke out. An audience member citing Hamas's crimes and the need for shared political solutions clashed with those chanting slogans. During the awards ceremony, other jurors and laureates spoke of ceasefire. Politicians later protested the festival's one-sided framing and the risk of antisemitism in some remarks—a sensitive issue in Germany, especially since the festival receives public funding. What emerged from Berlin was not a nuanced and balanced reflection on the Palestinian question, but only deeper division.
This intensity of local debate reflects how accustomed Germany is to reckoning with its past. Director Julia von Heinz, in her first English-language film Treasure, addresses the worst chapter of all. In 1991, a New York woman and her Polish-born father (Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry) travel to Poland so she can see where her family comes from. It starts as comedy—she speaks no Polish, and her overprotective father is ebullient and clumsy. But as the journey deepens, so do his painful memories: he survived the Holocaust. What works best is the chemistry between them as they enact a fraught father-daughter bond, drifting apart over generational and cultural rifts, then drawing close again through affection rekindled by the discovery of their origins.
It takes a moment to place the historical period of Andreas Dresen's From Hilde with Love. The nineteen-forties, Nazi era, but without the familiar iconography. After Hilde's arrest—she is young and pregnant—the film splits in two. One half documents her imprisonment while the other unfolds backward, memory by memory, until the furthest past. She belongs to a youth resistance group, but we learn little of their ideology. The characters aren't heroic (Hilde was real; East Germany deemed her a hero), but humanized—young people like those today, capable of political commitment yet hungry to live fully, to laugh, to love. They don't surrender, at least not in their will to dream, even to Nazi ferocity that would tolerate no dissent.