The Berlin film festival on Saturday awarded its Golden Bear top prize to a documentary by French director Nicolas Philibert and its best acting award to an eight-year-old girl in what jury chief Kristen Stewart described as a “boundary-pushing” event.
On the Adamant, coming more than 20 years after Philibert’s acclaimed education documentary To Be and To Have, is about a floating day-care center for people with psychiatric problems on the Seine in Paris.
Thanking the jury, Philibert, 72, said “that documentary can be considered to be cinema in its own right touches me deeply”.
On a night full of surprises, the festival’s gender-neutral acting prize was awarded to an eight-year-old, Spain’s Sofia Otero.
The young actress won the prize for playing a transgender child in 20,000 Species of Bees, the feature debut from Spanish director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren.
Critics have lavished praise on the film. Screen Daily, for one, predicted that “arthouse audiences worldwide should respond to the pathos, breadth, and humanity of a film that takes a while to build but, when it does, never loses its grip.”
Otero, who fought back tears when collecting the award, later told journalists she was “very grateful, very happy”.
Stewart, at 32 the youngest president in the festival’s history, said the jury had been asking themselves all week “what makes a movie a movie.”
They had set aside “invisible parameters” in awarding the Golden Bear, she said, because “when you focus too much on what something is you tend to lose track of what it does.
Garrel dedicated the prize to his children and to French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, “a great master for many of us,” who died last September.
Second prize went to Afire from German director Christian Petzold, about a group of friends whose holiday retreat to the Baltic coast goes horribly wrong.
Variety called it “wincingly well-observed and acidly funny, ”while the Hollywood Reporter said it was “a deceptively simple and straightforward but emotionally layered film.”
Coming in third was Bad Living by Portugal’s Joao Canijo, about several female members of the same family who run a dilapidated hotel and are also struggling with their relationships with one another.
On the Adamant offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of adults and their carers in the Parisian day-care center, which puts an accent on offering them a creative outlet. The film is “an attempt to overturn the image we have” of people with psychiatric problems, Philibert said.