It wasn't just the unusually good weather that dominated this year's Berlin International Film Festival. There was mischief in the air too at the 64th Berlinale which ran from February 6 to 16 - hardly surprising given Lars von Trier was making his first festival appearance since Cannes 2011 where he joked about being a Nazi and was banned by the festival officials.
The Danish director, who brought the extended version of Volume I of his two-part sex odyssey Nymphomaniac, kept to his self-imposed media silence but then he didn't need to speak: attending the photo-call in a black T-shirt that read "persona non grata" said more than enough.
Meanwhile, his star Shia LaBeouf tried to outshine him, leaving the press conference after one question, then arriving on the red carpet with a paper bag on his head that read "I am not famous anymore", a theme he's been inexplicably perpetuating on Twitter since the turn of the year.
But what of the film? This was Von Trier's unexpurgated "hardcore" director's cut (the shorter version, already playing in some cinemas in Europe, was not overseen by the director). In truth, the additional 28 minutes, bar a few flashes of explicit sexual contact, weren't so shocking. Yet the 145-minute version deepened the title character, Joe (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and, as a teen, by Stacy Martin), and whetted the appetite for the uncut Volume II.
At the awards ceremony, others, including members of the Asian contingent, took the limelight. This year's Golden Bear went to Diao Yinan's Chinese film noir Black Coal, Thin Ice (with lead Liao Fan snagging the best-actor prize). And to Zeng Jian, the cinematographer of Lou Ye's Blind Massage, a drama set in a massage institute run by the blind, went the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution, while Haru Kuroki was presented with the best-actress prize for her work in veteran Japanese director Yoji Yamada's The Little House.
Richard Linklater was awarded the Silver Bear for best director (a prize he won in 1995 for Before Sunrise). An elegant meditation on youth and ageing, childhood and adolescence, his Boyhood is a remarkable work shot over the course of 12 years, during which it charts the growth of a young Texas boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who lives with his mother (Patricia Arquette) and sister (Linklater's daughter, Lorelei), and sees his unsettled father (Ethan Hawke) on weekends.