Malayalam film Ottal wins award in Berlin International Film Festival

Gianfranco Rosi, director of Fuocomare (Fire at Sea), carrying the Golden Bear trophy for Best Film, poses with his daughter at the 2016 Berlinale Film Festival in Germany on Saturday. (Photo: AP)

Malayalam film Ottal has been named the best children’s film at the Berlin International Film Festival and honoured with the Crystal Bear award in the “Generation KPlus” section.

The film, directed by Jayaraj Rajasekharan Nair, is about the story of an old fisherman and his grandson. The movie is an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s short story Vanaka.

Jayaraj is known for adapting literary classic into films. He has earlier made films based on Shakespeare’s works such as Othello and Antony and Cleopatra.

“GENERATION K+ Crystal Bears announced! Best Film: Ottal,” a post on the official Twitter account of Berlinale read. This is the third year in a row that Indian films have triumphed. Ottal bagged the National Award for best film on Environment Conservation/Preservation and it set a record at 20th International Film Festival of Kerala by sweeping all the top awards. The Berlin film festival wraps up on Sunday after Fire at Sea, a harrowing documentary about Europe’s refugee crisis, clinched its Golden Bear top prize from a jury led by Meryl Streep. As Europe grapples with its biggest migrant influx since World War II, the picture by Italian director Gianfranco Rosi offers an unflinching look at life on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where thousands of asylum seekers from Africa and West Asia have arrived trying to reach the European Union over the last two decades.

In other prizes, France’s Mia Hansen-Love won the Silver Bear for best director for her drama Things to Come starring Isabelle Huppert as a philosophy teacher, whose marriage falls apart just as her elderly mother dies. Tunisia’s Majd Mastoura won the Silver Bear for best actor for his role in Hedi, a love story set in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, which also won best debut feature.

The Silver Bear for best actress went to Denmark’s Trine Dyrholm for her role as a wronged wife in Tho-mas Vinterberg’s The Commune, a semi-autobiographical take on his 1970s childhood.

Oscar-winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic took the runner-up Grand Jury Prize among 18 contenders for Death in Sarajevo about the corrosive legacy of the 1990s Balkan wars.

A more than eight-hour-long historical epic by Filipino director Lav Diaz, A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, claimed the Alfred Bauer Prize for a feature film that opens new perspectives in cinema.