Danis Tanovic’s Smrt u Sarajevu (Death in Sarajevo), which is based on Bernard-Henri Levy’s 2014 award winning play Hotel Europa, is the winner of this year’s Silver Bear, the second most coveted prize of the Berlinale – the Berlin International Film Festival.

Israeli filmmakers also came out shining this year with their wins of the two Panorama Audience Awards – Tomer and Barak Heymann with best documentary Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? and Udi Aloni with best full-length fiction, Junction 48.

Danis Tanović, whose An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker garnered his film with the Silver Bear for best actor at the Berlinale in 2013, offers a satirical parable about political dreams and nightmares through Smrt u Sarajevu (Death in Sarajevo). As in Bernard-Henri Levy’s play, Tanović portrays his Hotel Europe as an arena of hope, violence, death and memorialization. Unlike Levy’s hotel, which surveyed Europe’s weak and ambiguous policy of the current military confrontation between the Ukraine and Russia, Tanović’s is located in Sarajevo and focuses on the aftermath of the Bosnian civil war which raged in the 1990s.

The aftermath of the Middle East wars, which followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, have been the hallmark of most of Udi Aloni’s films. And in keeping true to its history of selecting politically polarizing themes, the Berlin Film Festival has been a loyal patron of Aloni and his controversial quest at promoting bi-national Israel-Palestinian statehood.

Although Aloni does attempt to portray the violence that exists within patriarchal and conservative circles within the Arab-Israeli community, he does so only subtly. For him, Jews remain the “oppressor”.

Aloni has always been quick to counter his, what many of his critics call bias against the State of Israel, by repeating “my Jewishness is that which makes me determined to do justice for the Palestinian people.” One Jewish journalist, however, countered that. Asking not to be named, she asked Aloni to explain why good Jews are never present in any of his films? Rather than answering her question, Aloni responded by claiming that “the racist Jewish protagonists [portrayed in his film] could have been portrayed a lot worse – mirroring the realities in Israel today”.

Junction 48 is Aloni’s sixth production appearing at the Berlinale. It tells the story of aspiring rapper Kareem who is hopeful that music will catapult him out of a life of drug dealing. It also tells the story of his girlfriend Manar, whose own future as a singer is constrained by archaic traditional values within Arab society.

The conflict between modern, communal and religious values is also the center of the Heymann brothers’ prize-winning documentary, Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?, The film portrays the reconciliation between an orthodox family from a Kibbutz and their gay son who emigrated to England on his road to self-fulfillment. It is a film set off to confront family disagreements and fears.

For Tomer Heymann, Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? is his fourth Berlinale film and second Audience Award win. His documentary Paper Dolls , about the life of Filipino migrant workers in Israel won in 2006.

In both the fiction and documentary categories, the winning Panorama films took the lead relatively early on and were able to hold this position until all votes were counted.