Rose Bryne and Andrew Scott have taken the top acting awards at this year’s Berlinale film festival, with Bryne winning the best leading performance honor for her barnstorming performance in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, and Scott taking the best supporting performance honor for playing Broadway composer Richard Rogers in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon.
Boundry-pushing Romanian director Radu Jude, who took Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2021 for his feature Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn, took the best screenplay honor for his latest feature Kontinental ’25, a caustic morality tale set in modern-day Romanian.
“I’m a bad screenwriter, so this is a very funny award to get,” said Jude, who thanked his film team, before adding a political barb, referencing Sunday’s national elections, and the rise of the far-right in Germany: “I just hope that next year’s festival doesn’t open with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will!”
The ensemble of Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower, a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Snow Queen, won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution. Oscar-winning French star Marion Cottilard plays a dual role in the feature, as both a 1970s film star and the winter monarch herself.
“I don’t think films change the world,” said Hadzihalilovic, accepting the prize, “but I think films help us to dream especially in this difficult moment. Vive le cinéma!”
Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat, a harrowing look at an Israeli-American family whose lives were upended when two of them were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, won the best documentary prize. Accepting the honor, Kramer said his film offered “no easy answers” but tried to capture the “nuances of one family” in crisis.
Mexican filmmaker Ernesto Martínez Bucio won the best feature debut honor in the festival’s new Perspectives section, winning for the wonderfully-titled The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box), a family dramas set in Mexico City in the 1990s that follows fives siblings abandoned by their parents with their schizophrenic grandmother who find the barrier between the real and the imaginary begin to dissolve.
2025 Berlin Film Festival Winners (Updating Live)
Golden Bear for Best Film
Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize
Silver Bear Jury Prize
Silver Bear for Best Director
Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance
Rose Byrne for If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You
Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance
Andrew Scott for Blue Moon
Silver Bear for Best Screenplay
Radu Jude for Kontinental ’25
Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution
For the ensemble of The Ice Tower, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Best Directorial Debut in Perspectives
The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box), director Ernesto Martínez Bucio
Best Documentary
Holding Liat, director Brandon Kramer
#Berlin #Film #Festival #Winners
