Berlinale 2013: The Winners

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 [3] in Promised Land, Rooney Mara [4] in Side Effects, Catherine Deneuve [5] 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 [6]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.

Read more reports on theartsdesk from the Berlinale [7]