The award ceremony for the 75th Berlin international film festival has kicked off in the German capital, with the first winners announced.
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 disolve.
There’s no clear favorite among the 19 films in competition at the 2025 Berlinale, and whatever the international jury, under president Todd Haynes, decides, it is likely to be a surprise.
There could be some star power in the acting category this year, with Ethan Hawke earning raves for his unrecognizable performance as the legendary musical-theater lyricist Lorenz Hart Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, and Oscar-winning French star Marion Cottilard also up for the best leading performance honor for her dual role in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower, a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Snow Queen, in which she plays both a 1970s film star and the winter monarch herself.
It was here in Berlin that Cottilard won best actress back in 2007 for La Vie en Rose, kicking off an awards run for the film that took her all the way to the Oscars, where she won best actress.
You can follow the Berlinale award ceremony live here.
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
Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance
Silver Bear for Best Screenplay
Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution
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
Original Source: Read More Here