Refugees documentary wins Berlin fest top prize

BERLIN - Agence France-Presse

Italian director Gianfranco Rosi reacts after receiving the Golden Bear for Best Film for the film "Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea)" during the awards ceremony of the 66th Berlinale, Europe's first major film festival of the year, on February 20, 2016 in Berlin. / AFP / TOBIAS SCHWARZ

Italian director Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea,” a harrowing documentary about Europe’s refugee crisis, clinched the Berlin film festival’s Golden Bear top prize on Feb. 20 from a jury led by Meryl Streep.

As Europe grapples with its biggest migrant influx since World War II, the picture offers an unflinching look at life on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where thousands of migrants from Africa and the Middle East have arrived trying to reach the European Union over the last two decades.    

Thousands more have perished on the dangerous journey in rickety, overcrowded boats.

The Eritrean-born Rosi, who spent several months on Italy’s Lampedusa making the film, dedicated the prize to its residents “who open their hearts to other peoples.” “I hope to bring awareness,” he said as he accepted the golden trophy from Streep.

The picture is told through the eyes of a 12-year-old local boy, Samuele Pucillo, and a doctor, Pietro Bartolo, who has been tending to the dehydrated, malnourished and traumatised new arrivals for a quarter-century.

Streep said “the jury was swept away” by “Fire at Sea,” which she called “urgent, imaginative and necessary filmmaking.”

The festival, now in its 66th year, had placed a special spotlight on the refugee issue, after Germany let in more than 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, with nearly 80,000 arriving in Berlin.

In other prizes, France’s Mia Hansen-Love won the Silver Bear for best director for her drama “Things to Come” starring Isabelle Huppert.

Tunisia’s Majd Mastoura won the Silver Bear for best actor for his role in “Hedi”, a love story set in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, which also won best debut feature.

The Silver Bear for best actress went to Denmark’s Trine Dyrholm for her role as a wronged wife in Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Commune”, a semi-autobiographical take on his 1970s childhood.  

Oscar-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic accepted the runner-up Grand Jury Prize for “Death in Sarajevo” about the corrosive legacy of the Balkans wars.

A more than eight-hour-long historical epic by Filipino director Lav Diaz, “A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery,” claimed the Alfred Bauer Prize for a feature film that opens new perspectives in cinema.

Best screenplay went to Polish filmmaker Tomasz Wasilewski, his portrait of the pivotal 1989-90 period in his country as told through four women, played by some of Poland’s best-known theatre actresses, at crossroads in their lives.

And cameraman Mark Lee Ping-Bing won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution for the poetic Chinese drama “Crosscurrent” about the passage of time in a society in upheaval as symbolised by the flow of the Yangtze River.