BERLIN (EJP)--- Argentinian Julio Chavez, the son of a Holocaust survivor, won the coveted best actor award at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival this weekend for his role in Ariel Rotter’s Competition film “El Otro” (The Other).

Millions of television viewers and 1,600 invited guests, including international stars of cinema, watched on as the top prizes were being handed out at Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz Theatre, aptly renamed Berlinale Palace during the 10 day event.

Film director Ariel Rotter ("El Otro)

While the Golden Bear, went to the Chinese-Mongolian co-production “Tu ya de hun shi” (“Tuya’s Marriage”), Rotter was awarded the Festival’s Jury Grand Prix Award for his movie, a story of an average business trip that suddenly turns into a different sort of journey, an expedition into another life that is also an inner journey.

Juan Desouza is on a business trip when he realises that the man who has been sitting next to him on the bus, has died. Secretly, almost as if it were a game, Juan decides to take on the dead man’s identity.

“Adama Meshuga’at” (“Sweet Mud”) won this year’s coveted Crystal Bear for the Best Feature Film in the Generation 14+ Section for young adults.

Dror Shaul's “Adama Meshuga’at” (“Sweet Mud”) won the Crystal Bear for the Best Feature Film in the Generation 14+ Section for young adults.

The movie depicts “a mother-son relationship of the most intense kind…in which individuality and freedom – a quest for finding one’s own way - as well as the desire for companionship was depicted,” Dror Shaul, the film’s director said at the General Section award ceremony a day earlier.

The film was based on many sequences of Shaul’s life. “However, this is not a film about Kibbutz life, it is a film about a close mother-son-relationship that just so happens to take place at a place I am familiar with,” Shaul said.

The Israeli cinematographic industry has rarely come out on top in the official Competition Section but this year, Joseph Cedar changed all that by winning the Silver Bear for Best Director for his war-anti-war film “Beaufort”.

The movie tells the story of Liraz Liberti, the 22-year-old commander of the south Lebanese Beaufort fortress, and his troops during the last few months prior to Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, in 2000, after 18 years of occupation.

"The film is the story of any battle in any war. It’s about young people who are asked to give their lives for a mountain that will soon lose its significance. And it’s about fear - contagious, intoxicating, palpable fear, a word Liraz Liberti never allowed himself to utter,” Cedar said at a press conference prior to first public screening of the film.

“I hope that this film will give political leaders a reason to fear war before deciding to go to war or to have the courage and strength to end them,” Cedar said, at the prize ceremony.

The Bubble

Another Israeli film picked up two independent film prizes – despite the many negative critiques it received from the press.

“The Bubble”, directed by controversial Israeli Eytan Fox, was awarded the Berlinale Panorama Section Prize from the "Confédération Internationale des Cinémas d’Art et d’Essai" which represents the members of the International Confederation of Art House Cinemas.

A scene from “The Bubble”, directed by controversial Israeli Eytan Fox, which was awarded the Berlinale Panorama Section Prize from the "Confédération Internationale des Cinémas d’Art et d’Essai" which represents the members of the International Confederation of Art House Cinemas,

The movie was recognised as the best film by the "Siegessäule" Readers’ Jury - a jury that is made up of seven readers of the Berlin gay and lesbian magazine "Siegessäule" and takes into account all films with gay or lesbian content, regardless of which section they are in.

“The Bubble” takes place on Tel Aviv’s hip Sheinkin Street – lined with its fashionable shops and galleries – giving it the appearance of being on another planet as opposed to Middle East.

The inhabitants of this peaceful soap bubble of a neighbourhood manage to keep an oblivious distance from the conflicts of the world that had been taking place all around them, for years.

“This is my fourth film and my fourth film to have been invited to the Berlinale,” Eytan Fox said. 

Fox told EJP that he believes that the world might be a more sensible and sensitive place “if more people, like my characters would be running the world.”