Berlin, February 21: A Turkish movie starring a seven-year-old boy as a struggling pupil who loses his father in a freak accident won the Golden Bear top prize at the Berlin Film Festival Saturday, jury president Werner Herzog said.
“Honey” is the third in a trilogy by director Semih Kaplanoglu tracing the life of Yusuf and his development as an artist and a person in rural Turkey, played here by Bora Altas.
The film is a slow-burning but deeply affecting story offers tender scenes between Yusuf and his beekeeper father Yakup, whose struggle to provide for his young family is threatened when the bees suddenly disappear from the region.
Meanwhile Yusuf is falling behind in school, crippled by shyness when asked to read aloud, despite the kindness of an attentive teacher.
Kaplanoglu thanked the festival for the honours and called attention to Turkey’s threatened wilderness, the setting for much of the film.
“We shot this film in an astonishing region with beautiful landscapes,” he said.
“The natural environment there is stunning but it could be destroyed because power stations are to be built there, hydroelectric power stations are planned for the region and I hope with this prize we have received this evening, we manage to protect the environment there as well.”
The Hollywood Reporter called the somewhat languorous film “exquisitely produced but dramatically erratic”.
“Slow-paced and without music other than the calls and cries of the forest creatures, ‘Honey’ suggests that while nature is not full of human kindness humans may find salvation there,” its critic Ray Bennett wrote.
The picture was the favourite of the 20 pictures in competition among German critics polled by Berlin’s daily Der Tagesspiegel.
—Agencies