DUBAI: Two films by Arab filmmakers won top prizes at the 76th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival, where filmmakers used their time on stage to advocate for a free Palestine.

Lebanese director Marie-Rose Osta, accepting the Golden Bear for best short film for “Someday, a child,” denounced Israeli bombings in her home country and what she described as a “collapse of international law” in the region.

“In reality children in Gaza, in all of Palestine, and in my Lebanon do not have superpowers to protect them from Israeli bombs,” she said. “No child should need superpowers to survive a genocide empowered by veto powers and the collapse of international law … If this Golden Bear means anything, let it mean that Lebanese and Palestinian children are not negotiable,” she said.

Abdallah Al-Khatib, winner of the best documentary prize for “Chronicles from a Siege,” brought a Palestinian flag on stage, and called out the German government for what he called its “complicity” in Israeli “genocide” in Gaza.  

“We will remember everyone who stood with us, and we will remember everyone who stood against us, against our right to live with dignity, or those who chose to be silent. Free Palestine from now until the end of the world,” he said.

Opening the awards ceremony, Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle addressed the controversy surrounding this year’s festival, as artists called out Berlinale for not taking a stance on Palestine. She described this year’s festival as having “felt raw and fractured,” with many attendees arriving in Berlin “with grief and anger and urgency about the world that takes place outside the cinema walls.

“That grief, that anger and that urgency is real and belongs in our community. We hear you,” Tuttle said.