Feb 25, 2018

Wes Anderson won Best Director and Leka Butch won Best Short Film.

It took 68 editions of the Berlin Film Festival, and 57 awards for best director, but an animated film director finally won the festival's Silver Bear for best director.

Wes Anderson, 48, won the best director prize for his stop-motion film Isle of Dogs, which also made history as the first animated film to open Berlin, a historic event from which Cartoon Brew reported earlier this month.

Anderson was not present to accept the award on Saturday night, but one of Isle of Dog's voice actors, Bill Murray, accepted in his place, telling the audience: “I never thought I'd go to work as a dog and come home with a bear. I'm glad I was deputized to watch the house here in case anything like this broke out… I'd like to be one more person from America to say 'Ich bin ein Berliner Hund.'” ('I am a Berlin dog.')

The only other animation winner at Berlin was Réka Bucsi, 29, who won the Audi Short Film Award for her new film Solar Walk, which had its world premiere at Berlin. The award comes with a 20,000 euro cash prize, making it among the world's most generously endowed prizes for short films.

Bucsi , a Budapest, Hungary-based filmmaker, is also the director of other shorts like Symphony no. 42 and Love. Her new short Solar Walk follows the journey of individuals and their creations in space. The film is designed to recall the liberating effect of automatic writing, a creative technique that was popularized by surrealists in the 20th century.