The 2013 Golden Bear in Berlin has gone to Poziţia Copilului (Child's Pose), by Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer. Starring Luminita Gheorghiu as a mother, Cornelia, drumming up support for her son Barbu, arraigned for killing a little boy in a speeding offence, the Berlinale winner is a much-favoured mix of - in this festival - a film combining steely contemporaneity and political fearlessness. Its documentary-like texture and compelling theme, along with Gheorghiu's hugely imposing performance, make it a popular winner.
A Silver Bear goes (as happily predicted by theartsdesk) to Paulina García (pictured below) for Best Actress in Sebastián Lelio's Gloria, from Chile, a rollercoaster of a film about desire, memory and deception in a society still snagged on its dark, fascist past; the film is courageously intimate, particularly on the part of its lead - hence her rightful prize - rather than politically loud. Two Silvers are picked up by Danis Tanović's An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, a challengingly tough movie about a Roma family in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Special Jury Prize, and Best Actor for Nazif Mujić.
Denis Côté's Vic+Flo Saw a Bear, also enjoyed by theartsdesk, wins the Alfred Bauer Prize for "a work of particular innovation". Silver for Best Director goes to David Gordon Green for Prince Avalanche, an offbeat, low-budget movie set in 1980s Texas about two men painting marks on a road - a remake from Iceland from 2011. Silver for Best Screenplay is won by Pardé (Closed Curtain), by Jafar Panahi, a deeply eccentric and intermittently fascinating "film-about-a-film" featuring people trapped in a house by a lake.
It's been the usual mix of the baffling - Pardé - the grisly (pretty well everything from eastern Europe), and the Big: Matt Damon in Promised Land, Rooney Mara in Side Effects, Catherine Deneuve in Elle s'en va - and from 20 years ago even the long-dead River Phoenix, in Dark Blood, George Sluizer's resurrected project which also stars Jonathan Pryce and Judy Davis. The Berlinale continues to specialise in the strange, the starry and the magnificently obscure. The next one runs from 6 to 15 February 2014.
