Turkish director’s film wins award at Berlinale

ISTANBUL

Turkish filmmaker Emin Alper’s ‘Tepenin Ardı’ (Behind the Hill) has won the Caligari Prize at the 62nd Berlin Film Festival, considered one of the world’s leading film fest.

Turkish filmmaker Emin Alper’s “Tepenin Ardı” has won the Caligari Prize at the 62nd Berlin Film Festival, considered one of the world’s leading film festivals.

Alper received the prize from Rüdiger Suchsland, president of the jury, at a ceremony at the Berlin Filmhaus.

Tamer Levent, Reha Özcan ve Mehmet Özgür star in the film, which is a Turkish-Greek production.
“Renowned Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Özcan won the same prize 14 years ago. I am happy and honored to be presented with the Caligari,” Alper told reporters.

The film festival awarded its top prize, the Golden Bear, to Italy’s veteran directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani for their gripping prison docu-drama “Caesar Must Die.” The picture shows real-life murderers and mafiosi from a high-security jail in Rome staging Shakespeare’s tragedy “Julius Caesar,” with their own personal dramas giving resonance to the play’s themes of betrayal and vengeance.

“We hope that when the film is released to the general public that cinemagoers will say to themselves or even those around them ... that even a prisoner with a dreadful sentence, even a life sentence, is and remains a human being,” Paolo Taviani, 80, said.

 The Jury Grand Prix runner-up prize went to “Just the Wind” by Bence Fliegauf, which was inspired by a spree of killings of Roma in Hungary in 2008 and 2009 in which six people died, including a 5-year-old boy. Rachel Mwanza, a 14-year-old from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, appearing in her first movie, the moving Canadian child soldier drama “War Witch,” accepted the Silver Bear award for best actress from jury member Jake Gyllenhaal.

The best actor award at the Berlinale

Denmark’s Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, who played mad King Christian VII in a costume drama based on a true story, “A Royal Affair,” took best actor. The film, starring James Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen as the king’s personal physician who seduced his queen and with her plotted to bring Enlightenment reforms to the tiny state, also won best screenplay.

The Tavianis, known for the socially engaged films they have been making for half a century, captured the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1977 for “Padre Padrone,” which also used amateur actors, and the Jury Grand Prix for “The Night of the Shooting Stars” in 1982.

Alongside hard-hitting international cinema, the 11-day event offered serious star wattage including Angelina Jolie presenting her directorial debut, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” and Meryl Streep accepting a Golden Bear for her life’s work.


Compiled from Anatolia news agency and Agence-France Presse stories by the Daily News staff in Istanbul.