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This year’s happy prize winners: several images of the winners of all the main prizes of the Berlinale 2008 – the Golden and Silver Bears, the Alfred-Bauer Prize and the Best First Feature Award sponsored by the GWFF, a society for safeguarding film and television rights. Also: a few photos of the festive award ceremonies for the Honorary Golden Bear and the Berlinale Cameras.

Apart from its quality film programme and the presence of top-notch stars, the Berlinale offers plenty of reasons to celebrate. And there’s no shortage of fun, as show plenty of snapshots of the Opening and Closing events in the Berlinale Palast, which were moderated this year by Katrin Bauerfeind.

Jury president Costa-Gavras (France) shared the work of the International Jury with Diane Kruger, Uli Hanisch (both from Germany), Walter Murch (USA), Alexander Rodnyansky (Russia) und Shu Qi (Taiwan). Together they selected the winners of the main prizes (the Golden and Silver Bears as well as the Alfred Bauer prize) in the Competition of the 58th Berlin International Film Festival.

Again this year the Competition presented a selection of high-calibre films and welcomed stars, renowned filmmakers and young international directing talents as guests. Personal styles and explosive political topics characterized the Competition programme –- and the awarding of the Bears. A representative selection of photos of the most important guests of all Competition films.

Again, Panorama hosted a successful mixture of the new, the opinionated and crowd-pleasers. The theme of music was noticeably present in features and documentaries (not just in the Panorama). Alongside music documentaries like Patti Smith, Dream of Life and Café de los Maestros, pop icon Madonna presented her directing debut Filth and Wisdom in the section. With guests like Laetitia Masson and Tilda Swinton, Panorama was able to attract many outstanding personalities from the world of film in 2008.

The Forum was a showcase for international auteur cinema, contemporary political documentaries, essays and formal experiments, once again. The programme won over audiences with an international mix of unconventional and extraordinary productions. Besides established directors such as Guy Maddin or Wakamatsu Koji, many young filmmakers such as Audrey Estrougo and Brigitte Bertele presented their innovative works. As in previous years the programme was complimented by artistic, installation works in Forum expanded.

For the second time as a stand-alone section, the Berlinale Shorts demonstrated how short films convey cinematic perspectives into the world in their own unique way and are nothing short of longer movies. Curator Maike Mia Höhne put together the programme of the series for the first time this year. Here you can find images of the directors in attendance as well as the Jury and the winners of the Golden and Silver Bears.

With a new venue in the Babylon and documentaries and short films in 14plus, the Generation section was able to expand its cinematic radius. Once again, the programme enchanted not only young viewers, but lived up to its reputation for showing several of the festival’s insider tips.

This year’s Perspektive Deutsches Kino showed once more that German film has no reason to keep a low profile in the festival programme. The section presented strong German productions, which often took a clear stance on controversial social issues. Here are some impressions of how the next generation of Germans asserted itself at the international festival.

This year’s Retrospective was dedicated to the director Luis Buñuel and gave audiences an in-depth look into the work of this in many ways exceptional filmmaker. Besides his work as a director, films on which Buñuel worked as assistant director, scriptwriter or producer were also shown. His oldest son, Juan Luis Buñuel, and one of Buñuel’s most frequent scriptwriters, Jean-Claude Carrière, presented their film El último guión – Buñuel en la memoria in person. The Homage in 2008 was honoring the work of Italian director Francesco Rosi.

The presence of Indina star Shah Rukh Khan as a guest in the Berlinale Special series was hugely popular and created a lot of commotion. Other exceptional new productions and distinguished personalities like Thomas Grube with his work Trip To Asia / The Quest For Harmony or Bernard Shakey aka Neil Young with CSNY Déjà vu were represented in the festival’s special programme.

Again this year, the Berlinale Talent Campus created a platform for 350 young international film talents, enabling them to meet and discuss with professionals, experts and creatives in all fields and to develop their own career opportunities. With this year’s theme “Screening Emotions – Cinema’s Finest Asset” the Campus focused on cinema’s many emotional realities and their effects.

Again in 2008 the EFM has insistently established itself as an important meeting and market place for the film industry: 430 international exhibitors presented themselves and their projects on the market. In the historical atmosphere of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, around 6,400 professional visitors enjoyed an overview of current developments in the international production scene as well as the opportunity to develop promising contacts and substantial business relationships.

In cooperation with the MDM and MEDIA the Berlinale Co-Production Market enables cooperation between talented writers and filmmakers with international representatives of the production industry. The goal of the many months of preparation and the three days during the festival is to bring together potential co-production partners and the realisation of high-quality film material. Thirty-five film projects from 25 countries were presented at this year’s Co-Production Market. Potential co-productions were discussed in the various event formats such as Country Tables, Theme Talks, Case Studies and one-to-one meetings.

The World Cinema Fund, a joint project of the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlinale, supports film productions from structurally disadvantaged regions and strengthens their international presence. The fund is active year round and uses the festival and the European Film Market as an important communication platform for the projects it supports.

The Special Presentations programme included the “Berlinale Keynotes”, a cooperation with Berlin-Brandenburg Media Board which addressed burning future issues, current challenges and possible strategies for the film industry and film culture. Furthermore, the series “Culinary Cinema – Eat, Drink, See Movies” approached the many links between film and food culture for the second time.

The poster series for the Berlinale 2008 was conceived by graphic designer Antonia Neubacher: “In graphic terms, the poster series is a reduced variation of the necessary and the apparently random. One can see the series as a programmatic statement, in which the Berlinale Bear as a visual representative of the festival is in constant motion”.