Top 10 Golden Bear Winners

With the 74th Berlin Film Festival under way in the German capital, Cinema Paradiso looks back on the pictures that have taken the coveted Golden Bear since 1951.

The youngest of the three major European film festivals after Venice and Cannes, the Berlinale was founded in 1950. It was the brainchild of Oscar Martay, a film officer with the American High Commission, who pushed through the plans with the help of his British counterpart, George Turner. They hoped that an international festival would draw attention to the city's divided status during the Cold War.

Film historian, Dr Alfred Bauer, was appointed festival director, as he had played a major role in helping to denazify the German film industry after the war. He would hold the post until 1976. But it was discovered in 2000 that Bauer had been an important member of the Reichsfilmkammer during the Nazi era and had buried his past in order to re-invent himself. Indeed, no one even suspected in 1951, when he backed the screening of Karl Ritter's El Paraiso, even though the director had made several pernicious propaganda films and had fled to Argentina after escaping from the Red Army in 1945, with the help of Richard Wagner's English daughter-in-law, Winifred.

The First Decade

Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) was the first film shown at the inaugural event at the Titania-Palast in Steglitz on 6 June 1951. But, while East Berliners could see films at lower prices at the Kino Corso, the Kremlin was unhappy that films from behind the Iron Curtain were banned. The Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films also took exception to the fact that an unsanctioned jury had chosen the prize-winners and the Golden Bears were decided by audience vote for the next five years.

The public verdict meant that Wilfred Jackson's Cinderella (1950) took the Golden Bear for best Musical, while Walt Disney doubled up when James Algar's In Beaver Valley took the Documentary prize. Sadly, these True-Life Adventures aren't on disc in the UK and time has not looked kindly on the winners in the other three categories: Drama (Leopold Lindtberg's Four in a Jeep), Comedy (Jean-Paul Le Chanois's Without Leaving an Address), and Thriller & Adventure (André Cayatte's Justice Is Done).

It's sad that an award at a major festival doesn't guarantee that a film will remain in the pantheon. But unless festivals and rights holders do more to make past winners available on disc and streaming platforms, they will be forgotten and cinema history's past will start to fade. The likes of Cinema Paradiso can only do so much to showcase these titles. Hence, while members can rent Golden Bear winners like Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953) and David Lean's Hobson's Choice (1954), we have no access to Arne Mattsson's One Summer of Happiness (1952) and Robert Siodmak's The Rats (1955), even though they're both notable achievements. The first beat Jean Renoir's The River and Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon to the top prize in a year that also saw Orson Welle's Othell banned because he had made critical comments about postwar Germany. Made on returning to his homeland after a spell in Hollywood, Siodmak's neo-realist drama became the first West German film to win the Golden Bear in seeing off Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones and Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch.

Frankly, it's a scandal in a country so obsessed with Strictly Come Dancing that Gene Kelly's 1956 winner, Invitation to the Dance, is not on disc in the UK. Building on the innovations that Kelly had pioneered in George Sidney's Anchors Aweigh (1945), Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951), and his own (and Stanley Donen's) Singin' in the Rain (1952), this terpsichorean triptych took screen dance to another level. Adapted by Reginald Rose from his own teleplay, Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957) proved just as pivotal in the evolution of the courtroom drama, with Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb outstanding in a jury room standoff that has since been much emulated and parodied.

Berlin's first decade ended with a hint of modernity in the air. In chairing the 1958 jury, legendary Hollywood director Frank Capra not only gave the Best Actor prize to Sidney Poitier for Stanley Kramer's race drama, The Defiant Ones, but he also ensured that Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries took the Golden Bear. The following year, the nouvelle vague announced itself with Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins catching the eye of Robert Aldrich's jury over the likes of J. Lee Thompson's Tiger Bay and Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, which would have such a key influence on George Lucas's Star Wars (1977).

The Sixties

A new decade saw Berlin seek to give the Golden Bear line-up a more international flavour. Consequently, a number of films from Asia were programmed, although the critical focus largely fell on the likes of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket and Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle, which represented the changing scene in France. However, the prize went to Spaniard César Fernández Ardavín's adaptation of an anonymous 1554 rite of passage, El Lazarillo de Tormes. With Satyajit Ray and Nicholas Ray on the jury, the 11th Berlinale came up with a more modish winner, as Michelangelo Antonioni's La notte prevailed over Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well and Godard's Une Femme est une femme, although the latter won the Silver Bear for Best Director and star Anna Karina received a special prize for her performance. Yet this proved to be the last festival for almost three decades with all-city access, as the Berlin Wall meant that screenings could no longer be held in the Soviet sector.

Financial problems hit the festival in the early 1960s, just as the first inklings of Das Neue Kino could be felt at 1962's inaugural Oberhausen Film Festival. Critics complained of a poor selection at the 12th Berlinale, although Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano and Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly have both come to be regarded as masterpieces. As has the eventual winner of the Golden Bear, John Schlesinger's A Kind of Loving, which reinforced the burgeoning reputation of British social realism.

Tadashi Imai earned Japan its first Berlin victory with Bushido, Samurai Saga, which saw Kinnosuke Nakamura excel in seven roles chronicling the warrior history of a businessman's family. Sharing the award was Gian Luigi Polidoro's To Bed or Not to Bed, a commedia all'italiana starring the wonderful Alberto Sordi. However, neither this nor Metin Erksan's Turkish drama, Dry Winter (1964), have ever been released on disc in the UK. Fortunately, Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Roman Polanski's Cul-de-Sac (1966) are available, with Eddie Constantine lampooning his B-movie persona as secret agent 003, Lemmy Caution, in JLG's teasing dissection of genre tropes and Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac essaying the quirkily mismatched couple offering shelter in their remote castle to gangsters Lionel Stander and Jack MacGowran.

Now there's a Cinema Paradiso double bill to savour. We have lots of Jerzy Skolimowski on offer, too. Just put his name in the searchline and click away. But, despite beating Éric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse, Skolimowski's Belgian Golden Bear winner, Le Départ (1967), is currently out of reach. Same goes for Swede Jan Troell's Who Saw Him Die? (1968) and Yugloslav Želimir Žilnik's Early Works (1969), despite the latter besting Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Love Is Colder Than Death, Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, and John Schlesinger's X-rated Oscar winner, Midnight Cowboy. The former emerged from a much stronger field that included Godard's Weekend and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's magnificent The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, which can be found along with Sicilia! (1998) and Une Visite au Louvre (2004) on Three Films (2010). How different the competition might have been had Brauer not turned down George Dunning's Yellow Submarine and landed Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (all 1968).

The Seventies

Film festivals are forever courting controversy, with Brauer being accused in 1964 of succumbing to church pressure in banning Swede Vilgot Sjöman's 491 from the Golden Bear competition. Such was the furore at the 20th edition, however, that the prizes were withheld after George Stevens and his jury refused to consider Michael Verhoeven's anti-Vietnam War drama, o.k. (1970). Despite their claim that the film's depiction of American troops contravened the rule that 'all film festivals should contribute to better understanding between nations', the jury was accused of censorship and the festival descended into chaos.

A semblance of normality was restored when Richard Harris's sole directorial venture, Bloomfield, joined Bergman's The Touch and Frank Nesbitt's Dulcima in falling short of Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (all 1971), a poignant drama about a Jewish family in Fascist Ferrara that went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Decameron also missed out, although compensation came the following year when he took the Golden Bear with The Canterbury Tales (1972), which edged out Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and Waris Hussein's The Possession of Joel Delaney. A year before his murder, Pasolini completed the 'Trilogy of Life' with Arabian Nights (1974).

The first Golden Bear winners from India and Canada are frustratingly unavailable at present, although both Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder (1973) and Ted Kotcheff's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) are too good to be forgotten and will hopefully be revived. The splendid Second Run label means that Cinema Paradiso users can discover the 1975 winner, Márta Mészáros's Adoption, which charts the relationship between childless fortysomething Katalin Berek and teenager, Gyöngyvér Vigh. The Hungarian became the first woman to win the Golden Bear, although she was followed two years later by Larisa Shepitko, whose harrowing war drama, The Ascent (1977), follows the misfortunes of two Soviet partisans in what is now Belarus. Like Pasolini, Shepitko would be dead within two years of her triumph, as she was killed in a car crash at the age of 41.

In between these significant wins, Robert Altman prevailed with Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976). Paul Newman headlined this contentious revisionist Western, but it caused much less of a stir than Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida (aka In the Realm of the Senses), which was confiscated by the police for contravening pornography regulations and was banned by the courts after a special hearing. This is now available to rent, but it says much that only two other films in competition in 1976 are currently on disc; François Truffaut's Small Change and Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth.

A triple threat from Spain was deemed worthy of the top prize by Patricia Highsmith's jury in 1978. But Tomás Muñoz's Ascensor, José Luis García Sánchez's Las Truchas, and Emilio Martínez-Lázaro's What Max Said have all rather dimmed in the collective memory and the multi-directored Germany in Autumn might have been a more provocative choice, as it offered a damning snapshot of the festival's host nation. But so did Peter Lilienthal's David (1979), which follows the efforts of a rabbi's son to flee the Third Reich and make his way to Palestine. In many ways a companion piece to Volker Schlondörff's The Tin Drum (1979), this poignant drama saw off Truffaut's Love on the Run, Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, and Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun, which earned Hanna Schygulla the Best Actress prize. But its success was overshadowed by another 70s controversy. Not over Paul Schrader's Hardcore, as one might expect, but because the Kremlin deemed the depiction of the Vietnamese people in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter to be racist. As a consequence, Warsaw Pact film-makers withdrew their pictures en masse.

The Eighties

Film journalist Wolf Donner became the director of the Berlin Film Festival in 1977 and moved the event from June to its current February berth. However, his tenure only lasted two years before he was succeeded in 1980 by Swiss documentarist Moritz de Hadeln, who retained the post for 21 years before critic Dieter Kosslick embarked upon his 18-year stint.

Donner's final festival saw a tie at the top, with Richard Pearce's unfairly neglected 1910s Western, Heartland, proving inseparable from Werner Schroeter's Palermo or Wolfsburg, as the story of a Sicilian migrant's courtroom ordeal after seeking work at the Volkswagen plant became the first West German winner at Berlin for 25 years. Another would follow at the 32nd festival, as Rainer Werner Fassbinder triumphed with Veronika Voss, which really should be on disc in the UK, as Rosel Zech is so superb in a film à clef about Sybille Schmitt, the UFA star who had also inspired Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950). Sadly, Fassbinder would succumb to the same curse that claimed Pasolini and Shepitko, as he died two years after his Berlin ovation.

In between these West German wins, Spain's Carlos Saura took the Golden Bear with Deprisa, Deprisa, a study of juvenile delinquency that typified the vogue for 'quinqui' films about working-class people on the margins that also included Pedro Almodóvar's What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984). Compatriot Mario Camus took the prize in 1983, when Jeanne Moreau's jury couldn't separate La Colmena, a story about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Ascendancy, Edward Bennett's tale of political awakening set against the Irish struggle for independence during the Great War. Julie Covington and Ian Charleson star in a potent drama that is ripe for rediscovery.

Frustratingly, Love Streams (1984) is one of the few John Cassavetes titles not currently available to rent from Cinema Paradiso. But we can bring you David Hare's simmering drama, Wetherby, which shared first prize with Rainer Simon's The Woman and the Stranger (both 1985), which became the first and only East German feature to claim the Golden Bear. While this caused little fuss, there was uproar at the 36th Berlin Film Festival when jury president Gina Lollobrigida accused the organisers of prefabricting the victory of Stammheim (1986), Reinhard Hauff's account of the Baader-Meinhof trial over such contenders as James Foley's At Close Range, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, and Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind.

Things were calmer in 1987, although no one knew at the time that Gleb Panfilov's The Theme would be the last film from the Soviet Union to win the Golden Bear. As one of the first films made by a Fifth Generation graduate from the Beijing Film Academy, Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum (1988) also testified to a changing world, as China started allowed more films to be exported as it sought to develop its own variation on a market economy. But Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1989) would go down in history as the last festival winner before the hated Berliner Mauer came down on 9 November 1989.

The Nineties

The 40th Berlin Film Festival was the first to host screenings in all parts of the reunited city. Critics agreed, however, that the occasion was more significant than the competition programme. Cinema Paradiso users can judge for themselves by renting Pedro Almodóvar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, Bruce Beresford's Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy, Roland Joffé's Shadow Makers, Volker Schlondörff's The Handmaid's Tale, Michael Verhoeven's The Nasty Girl, David Hayman's Silent Scream, and Danny DeVito's The War of the Roses.

And that little lot of supposedly sub-par offerings comes before we get to the joint-winners, Costa-Gavras's Music Box, which screenwriter Joe Eszterhas based on the war crimes of his own father, and Jirí Menzel's Larks on a String, a stinging political allegory set in a scrap metal yard in the 1950s that caught the mood of the new era as it had been suppressed by the Czechoslovakian authorities for 21 years after being made during the Prague Spring.

Italian provocateur Marco Ferreri took the honours the following year, with The House of Smilesbeing deemed superior to two winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture winners, Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990) and Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). This unique pairing came about as Berlin (which had always been proudly esoteric in its selections) opted for once for a crowd-pleasing line-up that also included Fred Schepisi's The Russia House and Bruce Beresford's Mister Johnson.

The victory of Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon (1992) the following year seemed to confirm this Hollywood swing, as Barry Levinson's Bugsy, Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear, Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again, Allison Anders's Gas Food Lodging, Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper, and David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch were all in the running for the Golden Bear. However, further evidence of the new waves breaking across Asia brought about a diplomatic tie between Fourth Generation Chinese veteran Xie Fei's Woman Sesame Oil Maker and The Wedding Banquet, which Taiwan's Ang Lee followed up with Sense and Sensibility in 1995 to make him the first, and so far only, film-maker to win the Golden Bear twice.

Emma Thompson would win an Oscar for adapting Jane Austen's novel and she would also receive a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father (1994), an account of the Guildford Four's struggle for justice that took the Golden Bear over the likes of Peter Weir's Fearless, Ken Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird, Jonathan Demme's Oscar-winning Philadelphia, Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours: White, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío's Strawberry and Chocolate, which was the first Cuban film selected for competition at Berlin.

Despite giving France its first win in 30 years, Bertrand Tavernier's The Bait (aka Fresh Bait, 1995) is not currently rentable. But Cinema Paradiso users are able to enjoy the decade's last three winners, with the Hollywood duo of Miloš Forman's biopic, The People vs Larry Flynt, and Terrence Malick's Second World War epic, The Thin Red Line, being separated by Walter Salles's deceptively charming Central Station, the first Brazilian winner of the Golden Bear that is graced by an Oscar-nominated performance by Fernanda Montenegro, as the retired teacher who writes letters for the poor and illiterate at Rio de Janeiro's main railway station.

The Noughties

A new millennium brought a new venue, as the Berlin Film Festival left the famous Zoo Palast on the Kurfürstendamm and moved into new premises on Potsdamer Platz. Gong Li presided over the jury at the 50th anniversary event, but the critics weren't impressed by the filmic fare. Hollywood dominated again, with Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, Danny Boyle's The Beach, Norman Jewison's The Hurricane, Miloš Forman's Man on the Moon, Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, and Wim Wenders's Million Dollar Hotel overshadowing interesting arthouse titles like François Ozon's Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Zhang Yimou's The Road Home, Jonathan Nossiter's Signs and Wonders, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Clouds of May.

Ultimately, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (2000) landed the Golden Bear, but it proved to be the only US winner of the decades. Indeed, the UK found itself centre stage for the next three years. Based on the writings of Hanif Kureishi, Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy was set in London and earned a certain notoriety because of an unsimulated encounter between Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox. Controversy also surrounded Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday (2002), which re-examined the notorious shootings in the Northern Irish city of Derry in 1972. But Michael Winterbottom's docudrama, In This World (2003), was afforded a much warmer welcome for its depiction of the journey made by Afghan refugees Jamal Udin Torabi and Enayatullah in a bid to claim asylum in Britain.

Greengrass shared the top prize with Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, which became the first animated film to win the Golden Bear under the jury system. Germany returned to winning ways after an 18-year gap (during which the country had reunified) when Fatih Akin's Head-On was chosen by Frances McDormand's jury for the potency of its storytelling and the quality of the performances of Birol Ünel and Sibel Kekilli as the age-gap couple who enter into a marriage of convenience. The achievement was even more notable, as this insight into the Turkish-German community found itself in strong field alongside Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss, Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, Patrice Leconte's Intimate Strangers, John Boorman's In My Country, Daniel Burman's Lost Embrace, Cédric Kahn's Red Lights, Éric Rohmer's Triple Agent, Annette K, Olesen's In Your Hands, Joshua Marton's Maria Full of Grace, Patty Jenkins's Monster, Kim Ki-duk's Samaritan Girl, Ron Howard's The Missing, and Theo Angelopoulos's Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow. Cinema Paradiso has all of these titles covered, so why not remind yourself (or discover for the first time) what world cinema looked like 20 years ago?

History was made in 2005, when U-Carmen eKhayelitsha became the first African winner of the Golden Bear. Filmed in Xhosa in the eponymous Cape Town neighbourhood, this exhilarating combination of extracts from Georges Bizet's 1875 opera and traditional African music was all the more remarkable because none of the cast had acted before and Mark Dornford-Yates was making his directorial debut. Bosnia and Herzegovina also got its first win with Jasmila Žbanic's Esma's Secret (2006), which sees a mother living in the Grbavica quarter of Sarajevo try to secure a discount on a school trip by proving that the father of her 12 year-old daughter was a war hero.

We can't currently bring you Wang Quan'an's 2007 winner, Tuya's Marriage. But the South American duo of José Padilha's Elite Squad (2008) and Claudia Llosa's The Milk of Sorrow (2009) are part of Cinema Paradiso's unrivalled catalogue of over 100,000 titles. Having captured the dangers of favela life in the award-winning documentary, Bus 174 (2002), Padilha made his fictional debut with another hard-hitting story, which centred on a police crackdown in Rio in the period before Pope John Paul's visit in 1997. This would spawn the sequel, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010). But Peruvian Claudia Llosa remains known in this country primarily for the Oscar-nominated story of a woman coming to terms with being abused during the heyday of the Shining Path terror group. This is sad, asAloft (2014) teamed Jennifer Connelly and Cillian Murphy as mother and son.

From 2010 to Now

A new attraction was added to Potsdamer Platz in 2010, when Marlene Dietrich became the first to be honoured on the Boulevard of the Stars. But it was business as usual at the 60th Berlin Film Festival, where Werner Herzog's jury presented the Golden Bear to Turk Semih Kaplanoglu for Honey (2010), which completed a trilogy that started with Egg (2007) and Milk (2008). The follow-up, Grain (2017), failed to secure UK distribution, however.

Turkey's first win was followed by Iran's, as Asghar Farhadi took the top prize for A Separation (2011). Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi also took the acting honours for playing a middle-class couple from Tehran whose marriage begins to unravel. This involving drama was also nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards, thus giving it two more firsts. Four years later, Jafar Panahi brought Iran a second victory with Taxi Tehran (2015), even though he had been banned from working for 20 years. Having appeared as an aspiring film-maker in this offbeat inner-city road movie, Hana Saeedi, travelled to Berlin to accept the prize on her uncle's behalf.

While the Iranian authorities had mixed views on this success, they were positively livid about the discussion of the death penalty contained in the four stories interlinked in Mohammad Rasoulof's There Is No Evil (2020). Consequently, his award was collected by his daughter, Baran. By contrast, the Italian screen community lauded veteran siblings Paolo and Vittorio Taviani for their victory with Caesar Must Die (2012), which chronicled rehearsals for a production of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Rome's notorious Rebibbia Prison. If this had a docudramatic feel, compatriot Gianfranco Rosi broke new ground when Fire At Sea (2016) became the first actuality to win the Golden Bear at the 66th edition. This study of how migrants are treated on the remote island of Lampedusa was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars, where it joined Ava DuVernay's The 13th, Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro, and Roger Ross Williams's Life, Animated in losing out to Ezra Edelman's O.J.: Made in America.

Back at the Berlinale, Peter Netzer's Child's Pose (2013) gave Romania its first win. It was followed by Adina Pintilie's Touch Me Not (2018) and Radu Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), although neither of this pair has been released on disc in the UK. Very much in the mould of New Romanian Cinema, Netzer's compelling drama follows doting mother Lumini?a Gheorghiu, as she tries to bribe people into not filing charges against her reckless son, Bogdan Dumitrache.

Corruption and the bleakness of life in an uncaring society is also the theme of Diao Yinan's Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), which follows detective Liao Fan's bid to discover who keeps dumping dismembered body parts into passing train trucks. Though equally beguiling, the visual contrast between this Chinese noir and Ildikó Enyedi's realist fantasy, On Body and Soul (2017), couldn't be more striking. But there are overlapping themes as abattoir supervisor Géza Morcsányi discovers he can commune in a highly unusual way with newly appointed meat quality inspector, Alexandra Borbély. She won an acting prize at the European Film Awards, but the picture lost out to Sebastián Lelio's A Fantastic Woman at the Oscars.

Such is the capriciousness of the distribution business that nobody in Britain bothered taking a punt on Nadav Lapid's Synonyms (2019), even though it was set in Paris and brought Israel its first Golden Bear. But these were strange days for the whole world, not just the Berlin Film Festival, which was now under the stewardship of Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. Coronavirus decimated the global festival calendar, but Berlin proved luckier than most, as the February 2020 event went ahead before lockdown, while the following year's festival was delayed until June in the hope that restrictions might have been eased.

Even so, distancing led to a 50% reduction in admittances when business returned to something approaching normal in February 2022. Isabelle Huppert opted to receive her Honorary Golden Bear via a digital link, however, although M. Night Shyamalan was present in person to lead the jury that awarded the top prize to Carla Simón for Alcarràs (2022), which became the first Catalan winner of the award. Played by a non-professional cast, this is a disconcerting treatise on rural change, as a family of peach farmers faces ruin when the new heir to the estate on which they toil decides to end decades of tradition.

Annoyingly, the unavailability of Nicolas Philibert's typically well-observed documentary, On the Adamant (2023), means that we must end our look back over seven decades of excellence on a blank. But we eagerly await the verdict of Lupita Nyong'o's jury, as it assesses the merits of the following: Piero Messina's Another End; Victor Kossakovsky's Architecton; Abderrahmane Sissako's Black Tea; Alonso Ruizpalacios's La Cocina; Mati Diop's Dahomey; Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's The Devil's Bath; Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man; Matthias Glasner's Dying; Bruno Dumont's The Empire; Andreas Dresen's From Hilde, With Love; Margherita Vicario's Gloria!; Claire Burger's Langue étrangère; Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias's Pepe; Min Bahadur Bham's Shambhala; Tim Mielants's Small Things Like These; Gustav Möller's Sons; Olivier Assayas's Suspended Time; Hong Sang-soo's A Traveller's Needs; and Meryam Joobeur's Who Do I Belong To.

It will be interesting to see how many of these hopefuls will have been screened in the UK or released to disc. There are, however, three things we know for certain already. Even if they win for My Favourite Cake, Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moqadam will not be able to collect their prize, as they have had their passports confiscated by the Iranian authorities and will face trial relating to their film-making activities. We also know that Martin Scorsese will receive the Honorary Golden Bear and that Rissenbeek and Chatrian will be handing over the reins to American Tricia Tuttle, who recently spent five years overseeing the BFI London Film Festival. As for the future, who can tell, with the very existence of cinema as we know it in jeopardy.