Farhadi won the Silver Bear for best director two years ago for his film “About Elly.” “Nader and Simin” was widely seen as a shoo-in for the Golden Bear, both for its outstanding quality in a year of insipid competition fare and the spotlight thrown on Iranian cinema by incarcerated director Jafar Panahi, for whom the festival kept an open jury seat for the duration of the festival.

The international jury of the 61st Berlin Film Festival, presided over by actress Isabella Rossellini, jointly awarded the Silver Bears for acting to the ensemble cast of “Nader and Simin.” Among the six actors and actresses who shared the two statues was the director’s teenage daughter, Sarina Farhadi. In the film, she plays the daughter of a feuding couple who is faced with choices of loyalty and ethics. The other honorees were Sareh Bayat, Leila Hatami, Peyman Moadi, Ali Asghar Shahbazi and Babak Karimi.

The Grand Jury Prix went to Bela Tarr’s sparse and minimalist “The Turin Horse,” about a coachman and his daughter going about their daily routine while an apocalyptic threat looms. The film has divided critics. Personally, I found the film’s purity and visual beauty masterful. But to be honest, the sparsely of dialogue, repetition of mundane actions and slowness make for an outstandingly difficult film to sit through (and I’m saying that as someone who watched all 7 ½ hours of “Satantango” in rapt concentration).

The separation itself is somewhat of a MacGuffin and does little more than set all the pieces in motion. The most we hear about marital disputes is in the tense opening scene, a single static shot that shows the spouses pleading their cases, from the perspective of the marriage clerk’s desk. Simin explains that she wants to take their eleven-year-old daughter to study and live abroad. Nader insists on staying behind to tend to his Alzheimer-afflicted father.

“El Premio” is a slow, meditative piece with a political back story and a headstrong protagonist too young to understand the danger that her family is in. Incidentally, these aspects are shared by last year’s Golden Bear winner, the Turkish production “Bal.” For a festival whose award choices are often seen as political, “El Premio” is exactly the sort of film that Berlin loves.

On Monday morning, the world mourned the passing of the world’s greatest living filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman. His death comes as less of a tragedy and more of a shock, a jarring reminder of the frailty of human existence. Bergman outlived virtually every other cinema great of his generation – most notably, Federico Fellini (who died in 1993) and Akira Kurosawa (who died in 1998). And unlike those directors, Bergman seemed to be working constantly up until near the end. His last film, “Saraband” – a sequel-of-sorts to Scenes from a Marriage - was screened at the 2004 New York Film Festival.

Curiously, Dans Paris (Inside Paris), second feature-film from the young French director Christophe Honoré (Ma Mère) takes place in a suburb of the French capital. The City of Lights is never far from consciousness; and its proximity is constantly reaffirmed by the ubiquitous Eiffel Tower, visible out of most windows, and in numerous exterior shots.