'Milk of Sorrow' wins top prize at Berlin Film Festival

Peruvian director Claudia Llosa's Milk of Sorrow, the magic-realism-tinged story of women suffering the effects of the long battle between Peru's government and Shining Path terrorists, won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter reported Saturday.

Argentinian director Adrian Biniez's debut Gigante (about a supermarket security guard obsessed with a late-night cleaner) shared the runner-up Silver Bear prize with German director Maren Ade's Everyone Else. The latter film's star, Birgit Minichmayr, won best actress honors, while Sotigui Kouyate took best actor for the British film London River (about the aftermath of the London terror bombings).

American films were not completely shut out of the competition. Oren Moverman and Alessandro Camon won the best script award for The Messenger, a film about two U.S. soldiers (Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson) assigned to inform a young widow (Samantha Morton) that her husband has died in Iraq. In addition, the festival's Audience Award went to Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno's gonzo-style documentary The Yes Men Fix the World in which the prankster filmmakers pose as reps for multinational corporations to make increasingly outrageous proposals.