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While Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman of 'The Hours' shared the best actress prize in one this year's hot Oscar favourites.
The 53rd annual Berlinale, one of Europe's top three film festival also awarded Sam Rockwell best actor for playing U.S. game show mogul Chuck Barris in George Clooney 's directorial debut 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind'.
The Golden Bear for best film reflected the central theme of this year's festival, the thorny topic of migration. 'In this World', directed by Michael Winterbottom , followed the fate of two Afghans in a Pakistan refugee camp who seek a new life in the West.
Their journey to London is long and hazardous. Winterbottom said he had been compelled to make the film, one of 22 competing in Berlin, because of a growing hostility toward immigrants throughout Europe.
'People say: 'These people shouldn't be here, they should be sent home'...but even if people are economic migrants, what's wrong with that?' the director said after last week's screening.
Of course, Winterbottom was not challenged on his ideas. No one present thought to ask him how many of these illegal immigrants he would actually allow to stay in the UK. One million, ten million, one hundred million?
Though in this case fiction did not really follow reality in the "documentary-style" account for one of the central characters. The fact is, Winterbottom travelled to Pehawar to choose his cast. And fifteen-year-old Jamal, picked from hopefuls in the camp in Peshawar, has since been given leave to stay in Britain until his 18th birthday.
Winterbottom dedicated his award to the film's two central characters, picked from a million refugees in Peshawar.
'In a way it's for them as representatives of all those million people and for all the other people in the world who face the choice of whether to stay in hardship or danger or to flee and try to make a new life elsewhere', he said.
Winterbottom accepted his award on Saturday evening after one of the strongest competition rosters at Berlin, whose film festival ranks behind Cannes, but alongside Venice.
Another British film, 'The Hours', which has picked up nine Oscar nominations, had been considered a frontrunner for both best film and best actress.
In the end, the jury headed by Canadian director Atom Egoyan , chose all three in the triple tale based on Virginia Woolf's breakthrough novel 'Mrs Dalloway'.
Spike Jonze's 'Adaptation', starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep, was awarded a Silver Bear as overall film runner up.
Unlike the Oscar awards, winning a Golden Bear has not necessarily provided a box office boost.
U.S. productions, among them 'Magnolia' which won in 2000 and 'Rain Man' in 1989, stand out as commercial successes.
Migration and human trafficking were central themes at this year's 11-day festival, but death also featured strongly.
Suicidal tendencies came to the fore in 'The Hours', The Life of David Gale' focused on the death penalty, while Spike Lee 's '25th Hour' showed a fractured and depressed New York City after the September 11 attacks.
Outside the competition, a series of films focusing on AIDS emerged, 20 years since its outbreak. While no films dealt with the Iraq crisis, many actors and filmmakers, such as Oliver Stone and Dustin Hoffman , used the podium to criticize President Bush's military build-up.
Still, the stars did come, from Anouk Aimee to Catherine Zeta-Jones, and 'Chicago' jazzed up the start, while Martin Scorsese's 'Gangs of New York' will ensure a thumping finale.
Organizers expect to have sold 420,000 tickets to almost 1,400 screenings of 300 films by the time the festival ends with a special day devoted to the public on Sunday.
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