BERLIN, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Turkish film "Honey" ("Bal") was the surprise winner of the coveted Golden Bear for best picture at the Berlin film festival on Saturday.
The movie, which has no score and only sparse dialogue and plot, tells the story of a young boy who ventures into the woods to find his missing father, a beekeeper.
Shot in lush mountainous forests, "Honey" features a critically acclaimed performance by the young Bora Altas as six-year-old Yusuf who must come to terms with momentous changes at a tender age.
The runner-up prize in Berlin was awarded to Romanian entry "If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle", a tough prison drama about a teenager who escapes jail in order to stop his mother taking his brother away to Italy.
Roman Polanski, under house arrest in Switzerland and fighting extradition to the United States where he is wanted for an underage sex case dating back 33 years, won a best director silver bear for political thriller "The Ghost Writer".
Russia’s "How I Ended This Summer" was a multiple winner, with Grigori Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis sharing the best actor award and director Alexei Popogrebsky picking up an outstanding artistic contribution prize.
Best actress went to Shinobu Terajima for the harrowing Japanese war drama "Caterpillar".
(Reporting by Mike Collett-White and Sarah Marsh, Editing by Michael Roddy)
