Yu Nan in Tuya's Marriage
"When I started making films, my teacher said film should show people's dreams. This film made my dreams come true," remarked Chinese director Wang Quan'an upon accepting the Berlin Film Festival's Golden Bear for his rural drama Tuya's Marriage, a portrait of the social and environmental costs of China's unbridled economic growth.
In Tuya's Marriage, a woman (Yu Nan) living in desertifying Inner Mongolia (a territory in northern China) tries to find a new husband to take care of herself and of her family, including handicapped husband #1. "I think that it is important, particularly in this time when the economy is booming," Wang remarked, "to ponder and reflect on what we're losing."
Tuya's Marriage is the third Chinese film to win the Golden Bear in the last 20 years, following Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum (1988) and Xie Fei's Women from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993). Last year, Jia Zhang-Ke's Still Life, which shows the environmental and social damage caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
The runner-up for best film was Grand Prix winner The Other, Argentinean director Ariel Rotter's tale of a man who undergoes a mid-life crisis — including an attempt to find himself a new identity — upon learning that his partner is pregnant. For his performance as the middle-aged man, Julio Chávez (above) won the Silver Bear for best actor. Critics generally gave Rotter's leisurely paced drama a cool reception.
The anti-war drama Beaufort, which depicts the withdrawal of an Israeli army unit from southern Lebanon, brought director Joseph Cedar a Silver Bear. At the Saturday gala ceremony, Cedar expressed his hope that "our leaders will be fearful of war and have the courage to end them."
The Silver Bear for best actress went to Nina Hoss (above) for her role as a woman who must deal with the ghosts from her past in Christian Petzold's German drama Yella. Hoss beat favorites Yu Nan and Marianne Faithfull, who plays a grandmother-turned-sex worker in the well-received Irina Palm — which was also one of the two or three favorites to win the Golden Bear.
"I didn't expect this at all because of the huge competition," Hoss told reporters. "I feel even more honored … to get this gift against Cate Blanchett [for The Good German] and Marianne Faithfull … and all those great actresses I really admire."
Hoss' win was the third in a row for German actresses at the Berlin festival. Last year, Sandra Hüller received the Silver Bear for her performance as a woman who believes herself possessed by the devil in Requiem, and the year before Julia Jentsch won the award for her star-making turn as German underground leader Sophie Scholl in Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.
Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin in The Good Shepherd
A special Silver Bear was given to the cast of Robert De Niro's Cold War drama The Good Shepherd, which was coolly received in the United States. The film stars Matt Damon as a CIA spy; also in the cast are Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton, Martina Gedeck, Tammy Blanchard, and De Niro himself. Upon accepting the award, Martina Gedeck (one of the stars of the popular The Lives of Others) dedicated the trophy to director De Niro.
The Alfred Bauer award, named after the festival's founder and given to "innovative" films, went to Park Chan-Wook's Korean romantic comedy I'm a Cyborg, But That's Ok.
"I would like to share this award with my wife," Park declared. "She is very unhappy with my career as a director. I am not home for weeks, busy all the time and even when I am home my head is full of other thoughts. I hope she will now forgive me. When I get home, I hope she will tell our friends, 'My husband is a director but that's OK.'"
Approximately 400 films were screened and more than 200,000 tickets were sold during the ten-day Berlin festival. Twenty-two of those films were competing for the Golden Bear.