THE Berlin Film festival jury got it right awarding the Golden Bear to Dahomey, a film that engages deeply with key topics of our time, but also displays a distinctive, humane cinematic style.

When it showed early in the festival, it had the look and smell of a Berlinale winner; an extraordinary hybrid of fiction and documentary in which Senegalese director Mati Diop gives voice to statues, allowing them to tell their own story.

The statues are 26 royal treasures stolen by French soldiers in 1892 and finally given back to the west African country of Benin in 2021. The supervisor touches the objects, made from wood and metal, with extreme care, while the people of Benin are exalted about their arrival.

The voices of the statues are imbued with a ghostly and evocative stature, and powerfully they seem to free themselves. This inventive film opens a kaleidoscopic reflection of both post-colonial and contemporary politics in the country, while yearning to restore cultural heritage. 

Other winners in the Competition included German film-maker Matthias Glasner, who won best screenplay for Dying. A modern melodrama dealing with dementia, cancer, depression and suicide, it is told in a straightforward manner with kindness and a subtle, absurd tone.  

This year’s German movies were strong. One of the most accomplished was From Hilde with Love by Andreas Dresen, telling a story of the past without cliches, moving and freshly made. Based on true events, the film centres on a group of anti-Nazi activists in Berlin during World War II. Pro-communist couple, Hilde and Hans are young, have dreams and they want to have families in an ideal world.

The Critics Award went to the Iranian My Favourite Cake, the story of an elderly divorcee looking for love in Tehran. The directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha had been denied the permit to travel to Berlin, as the film contains elements the Iranian authorities deemed unacceptable: the consumption of alcohol, singing and dancing, women standing up against the morality police, and so on.

Highly poetic and humane, it is an angry political movie that establishes its own authority with elegant shots and an eloquent script of verbal and visual wit. It is certainly something that we have not seen in Iranian cinema for decades.

Best Supporting Performance went to Emily Watson for playing a nun in this year’s opening film, Tim Mielants’ Small Things Like These. Based on Irish author Clare Keegan’s bestselling historical novel, the film sees Cillian Murphy as a dutiful father and coal wholesaler who, while delivering coal over Christmas 1985, discovers the shocking truth about the local convent. Deep and claustrophobic, dealing with a traumatic past, this is a shattering story of redemption. A truly magnificent film. 

Also deserving attention, Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s Black Tea about an African woman seeking a new life in China. It has a radical and a feminist breath, and the director’s romanticism gives the film its unique kick, as he explores the interconnections, economic and cultural, in a globalised world.

Beyond the competition, the Berlin Festival’s documentary section could not be more vibrant, responding to these turbulent times, documenting the global crises, wars, and social division. 
  
Intimate and political, Myriam el-Hajj’s Diaries From Lebanon displays crucial stages of the political, economic and social turmoil of Lebanon from the 2018 to 2021. It follows three characters: a political activist, a vigorous singerc and a veteran of the Lebanese civil war (1975-90). The film never loses its grip. A lucid meditation on self-determination v social responsibility, how much love of one’s country mandates critique of its governance. 

On a similar subject from another part of the globe, Oasis directed by Tamara Uribe and Felipe Morgado, chronicles the turbulent times which led Chile to attempt a rewrite of the Pinochet-era constitution. It contains satire in describing the positions of some characters from the conservative extreme right — very much in tune with the other Latin American right — uneducated, lazy and verbose. 

Direct Action by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell follows up-close an anti-globalist environmental group that successfully stopped big business interests from building a new airport in France. A mesmerising portrayal of a highly singular political movement.

Also, at the festival a poignant biopic, with a long title True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, When Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward Between 1953 and 1956 by Abdenour Zahzah. It focuses on a renowned politician and decolonialisation activist Dr Fanon during his brief time as a psychiatrist in Algeria, dedicating his life to the oppressed. The film, shot in majestic black and white, is undeniably fascinating, offering some explosive highlights.  

If there was a prize for the most provocative movie, it surely would have gone to Canadian film-maker and artist Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor, inspired by Pasolini’s Teorema. Set in London, it follows a refugee, a handsome black man who emerges from a suitcase one night, and comes to stay with a bourgeois family, seducing every single one of them.

The “guest” becomes a sort of sexual healer, a subject that LaBruce has explored before through the trope of the black male sexual potency as a threat to the domestic white bourgeois sexual repression. LaBruce combines conventional narrative and film-making techniques, many having explicit sexual content and uses humour as a weapon in his films to critique society; sex as the sharpest knife to cut through society’s facade.

Berlin has always been more markedly political than most film festivals, but this year the departing directors, Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek in this farewell edition have pulled off something stunning: this year, it has been bravely radical and revolutionary.