Falling in love for the first time is one of the standard tropes of the movies. Brazilian director Daniel Ribeiro gives it a new twist by making the teenage hero of his The Way He Looks (Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho) blind, and realising in the course of the film that he’s gay.

We see the harshness of everyday life in Danis Tanović’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker first in its snowy, subsistence landscapes, as hero Nazif goes out to the forest to bring in whatever wood he can find to keep the family home warm. But by the end of the film, which took the Jury Grand Prix at last year’s Berlinale, we have seen, much more chillingly, the harshness of human behaviour.

He cuts a dash, that man Cave. Very tall, gangly, with his idiosyncratic snub nose and upside-down-U-shaped hair, the Australian is a one-off. His growly music isn’t always easy to like. In his fury days with the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, he was a post-punk rock poet. He has, of course, oceans of fans. It goes without saying that they will be a-quiver at 20,000 Days on Earth (20,000 was the number of mortal days Cave had notched up three years ago when this documentary started: he’s now 57).

The Chinese thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice by director Diao Yinan won the Golden Bear at the closing ceremony of the Berlinale last night, as well as picking up the best actor prize for its star Liao Fan.

It was a night for Asian cinema in general, with the best actress award given to Japan’s Haru Kuroki, playing in veteran director Yoji Yamada’s The Little House, while Chinese cinematographer Zeng Jian came away with the Silver Bear for outstanding contribution in the technical categories for his work on Lou Ye’s Blind Massage.

You couldn’t imagine The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (****) coming out of anywhere except France. Three years ago the enfant terrible of French literature vanished for some days from a book tour, giving rise to rumours as extreme as that he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaida. Guillaume Nicloux’s wry and eccentric comedy, playing in Berlinale’s Forum programme, recycles that legend, only in his film Houellebecq is vanished to a gypsy compound outside Paris where he’s held in circumstances that couldn’t be friendlier.

Back in the 1950s the Zurich underground club Der Kreis was a rare beacon of tolerance of homosexuality in Europe. Fitting then that Swiss director Stefan Haupt’s drama-documentary of the same name, The Circle (****), won this year’s Teddy award at the Berlinale, in the documentary category: the Teddies have been going since 1987, making them no less of a pioneer in the gay world, their brief to acknowledge and support LGBT cinema from around the world.

Not the least remarkable thing about Richard Linklater's Boyhood is its being shot over a decade – that’s probably a first in film history. And it’s more than a sociological experiment, portraying in vibrant contemporary detail and a lot of observational fun the growing-up in Texas of a little boy, Mason, which will surely have an extraordinary impact on the life of the actor, Ellar Coltrane, who played him. It must be a bit like having a red carpet rolled out for you before you know the meaning of or have ever uttered the words “acting”, “award” and “celebrity”.

French-Canadian Robert Lepage is a clever theatre inventor and tireless dramatist. This includes film, though with much less frequency than his stage pieces. The latter have refined themselves into films that are not going to get people running off the street but which are never less than thoughtful – and that is part of the problem. His stage imagination, so flexibly at work in The Dragons’ Trilogy and The Far Side of the Moon (which also became a film), wreaks endless visual and sonic surprises, and also allows itself to probe, three-dimensionally, philosophically.

Back at the Venice Biennale in 2010, the German film director Wim Wenders showed a 3D video installation titled “If Buildings Could Talk”.

Stellan Skarsgård is having a good Berlinale. The veteran Swedish actor proved the main calming influence in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Volume One (***), which the Berlin festival screened as a world premiere in the director’s version, running at 145 minutes. That’s about 25 minutes more than the UK will be seeing from 21 February, when both parts of the work will be released.