Berlinale: Winners of the Golden and Silver Bear awards

In November 2021, 26 treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey were returned from Paris to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Filmmaker Mati Diop followed the artifacts' journey in a documentary that also fictionalizes the thoughts of one of the statues. The work won the Berlinale's top award, the Golden Bear.

This is South Korean director Hong Sangsoo's fourth Silver Bear since 2020. True to the filmmaker's style, "A Traveler's Needs" is a blend of melancholic drama and awkward comedy. Set in Seoul, it stars Isabelle Huppert in the lead role of a mysterious Frenchwoman who likes to walk barefoot and to lie down on rocks.

The fact that a comedy was selected in the official competition was already unusual. Bruno Dumont's sci-fi spoof also impressed the international jury. Starring Fabrice Luchini in the role of a Darth Vader-like figure, the absurdist space opera has the forces of good and evil fighting in rural northern France.

Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias' was honored with a Silver Bear for his experimental film, "Pepe." Combining documentary and fiction, the philosophical fable is told from the perspective of the ghost of a hippo called Pepe, brought from Africa to be kept in drug lord Pablo Escobar's zoo in Colombia.

At the beginning of Aaron Schimberg's "A Different Man," Sebastian Stan (shown here left) wears facial prosthetics to resemble Adam Pearson (right), a British actor and disability rights activist with a rare genetic condition. At some point in the wacky indie film, Stan recovers his Marvel superhero movie good looks, but portrays throughout an insecure actor who is torn by envy.

Starring alongside Cillian Murphy in Tim Mielants' "Small Things Like These," the British actress portrays a nun in charge of concealing the dark secrets of one the Magdalene Laundries, which were workhouses for young women who had become pregnant out of wedlock. While the movie is set in the 1980s, the cruel institutions were active in Ireland from the 1820s to 1996.

Dealing with different aspects of death, the three-hour comedy-drama by German filmmaker Matthias Glasner follows different members of a dysfunctional family, including Lars Eidinger in a powerful portrayal of a conductor.

This award, which recognizes work in one of the different artistic departments of a film production, went to cinematographer Martin Gschlacht. His camerawork on "The Devil’s Bath," directed by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, contributed to this historical piece's grim atmosphere.

Directed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor), "No Other Land" documents the eradication of a village in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers, a catastrophe for the Palestinian families living in the area.

A 70-year-old widow (Lily Farhadpour) leads a lonely life in Tehran, until she decides to initiate a date with a stranger. She is shown unveiled and drinking wine, which got directorial duo Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha banned from traveling outside of Iran. Snubbed by the Bears jury, it won the international film critics' Fipresci Prize, as well as the ecumenical jury's top prize.