Berlinale 2023: Golden and Silver Bear winners

The only documentary in the Berlinale's competition section, "On the Adamant" by French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert won the festival's top award. It portrays participants of creative workshops in a psychiatric facility in central Paris, a barge anchored on the Seine called the Adamant. The patients' drawings, musical performances and reflections on their own condition have an unsuspected depth.

Following "Undine" (2020) and its water-based myth, German filmmaker Christian Petzold pursues his trilogy of films based on different elements. This time, fire is the central motif as it blazes near a beachside house where an insecure writer (Thomas Schubert) hopes to work on his book. In "Afire," everything is slightly surreal, and love is a burning flame, with Paula Beer's smile at its heart.

Portuguese director Joao Canijo's "Bad Living" is set in a hotel run by a family of women who despise each other. The slow, aesthetic experiment has its counterpart in a second film, "Living Bad," which focuses on the guests of the same location and was screened in the Encounters section of the Berlinale.

A family of puppeteers is led by a patriarch who hopes his children will keep his art going when he is gone. Filmmaker Philippe Garrel, associated with the French New Wave movement, cast his real-life children — Louis, Esther and Lena Garrel — in the roles of the film's siblings. While it was described by critics as "a minor work," the jury recognized it with one of the festival's top awards.

In "20,000 Species of Bees," directed by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, a young child (Sofia Otero) discovers her true gender identity during a summer vacation with her extended family in the Basque Country. The young actor's performance is subtle and powerful at the same time.

Another German entry in the competition, "Till the End of the Night" by Christoph Hochhäusler, is a romantic detective thriller starring transgender actor Thea Ehre, who is on an undercover assignment with Robert (Timocin Ziegler), a narcotics cop who used to be her lover before her transition. Ehre's performance "blew our hair back," said jury president Kristen Stewart.

German arthouse auteur Angela Schanelec is known for her experimental films, featuring carefully composed long shots and narrative ellipses. She had already won a Silver Bear for best director with "I Was at Home, But…" in 2019. "Music" is an enigmatic retelling of the myth of Oedipus.

German actor Franz Rogowski (center) plays the role of a Belarusian who leaves his country and attempts to start a new life by joining the French Foreign Legion. With "Disco Boy," Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese offers a hallucinatory trip backed by dark electronic beats created by French techno star Vitalic. Helene Louvart's cinematography was honored with a Silver Bear.