The race for one of the film festival world's most prestigious awards is hotting up dramatically, ahead of the results declaration on Saturday. The Golden Bear, the prize for the best film at the Berlin film festival, is comparable in status to Cannes's Golden Palm and Venice's Golden Lion, and the suggestion is that, out of the 16 films originally selected to compete, two are neck and neck: the Iranian film Nader And Simin, a Separation, and the Hungarian entrant, The Turin Horse.
Nader And Simin, directed by Asghar Farhadi, is an account of a middle-class Iranian couple's divorce and its ramifications, and has won outspoken praise from critics – notably Deborah Young of the Hollywood Reporter, who said "it succeeds in bringing Iranian society into focus for in a way few other films have done".
Iran's ministry of Islamic culture and guidance initially banned Farhadi from making the film after a speech in which he expressed support for film-makers Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi, both of whom are allied with the opposition Green movement. The ban was lifted a month later, in September 2010, and the film was finished. Panahi, director of Offside and The White Balloon, was sentenced to six years in jail in December 2010, and has therefore been unable to take up his invitation to be a jury member for the Berlin festival. A chair has been symbolically left empty for him in Berlin.
The other fancied contender, The Turin Horse, is the latest work from uncompromising Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, perhaps most notorious for the seven-hour film Sátántangó, but best known in the UK for The Man From London, a Georges Simenon adaptation starring Tilda Swinton. His new film – which the 55-year-old Tarr has said will be his last – is a typically opaque fable about a turn-of-the-century cabman's horse.
Critic Jonathan Romney, writing for Screen International, suggested that audiences may be "thrilled by the audacity of a film that dares to take cinema back to a bare-bones language reminiscent of the silent era".
Other films in contention include Margin Call, the financial meltdown thriller with Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons, and If Not Us, Who, a German drama about the roots of the Red Army Faction.
