'Dahomey' doc on looted African art wins Berlin film fest

"Dahomey", a documentary by Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop probing the thorny issues surrounding Europe's return of looted antiquities to Africa, won the Berlin film festival's top prize on Feb. 23.

Kenyan-Mexican Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o announced the seven-member panel's choice for the Golden Bear award at a gala ceremony in the German capital.

Diop said the prize "not only honors me but the entire visible and invisible community that the film represents."

South Korean arthouse favorite Hong Sang-soo captured the runner-up Grand Jury Prize for "A Traveler's Needs," his third collaboration with French screen legend Isabelle Huppert.

Hong, a frequent guest at the festival, thanked the jury, joking "I don't know what you saw in this film."

French auteur Bruno Dumont accepted the third-place Jury Prize for "The Empire," an intergalactic battle of good and evil set in a French fishing village.

Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias won best director for "Pepe," his enigmatic docudrama conjuring the ghost of a hippopotamus owned by the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar.

Marvel movie star Sebastian Stan picked up the best performance Silver Bear for his appearance in U.S. satire "A Different Man."

Stan plays an actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic disease causing disfiguring tumors, who is cured with a groundbreaking medical treatment.

The Romanian-American star called it "a story that's not only about acceptance, identity and self truth but about disfigurement and disability, a subject matter that's been long overlooked by our own bias."

'Collusion'

Britain's Emily Watson clinched the best supporting performance Silver Bear for her turn as a...