The jury for the 52nd Berlin Film Festival should have awarded a Golden Bear to itself. "Best and bravest performance by 10 people banged up in a room after watching 50 hours of celluloid." I practically leaped up to the ceiling - there are witnesses - on hearing that Indian filmmaker Mira Nair's judging panel had honoured the Japanese animation feature Spirited Away. When I had raved about Hayao Miyazaki's film to colleagues, praising its beauty, humour and magical storytelling, they said, "Yes, yes, but an animated film can never win the Golden Bear." To which I now say, as Russell Crowe expressed it one day when rubbed the wrong way by Berlin pressfolk, "You can put your scepticism where the sun don't shine." This, as noted last week, is a Japanese Alice in Wonderland with enchantment in every frame. Glory to Team Mira for its wisdom, even though it split the Bear - never a pleasant task - between Miyazaki and Britain's Paul Greengrass, who won half a golden grizzly for the much-admired verismo of Bloody Sunday.

The jury could have retired with honour after this shared benediction, but its wisdom proved unrestrainable. It gave the Grand Jury Prize to Germany's funny, deserving Grill Point, also reviewed last week. (Mike Leigh meets German miserablism.) Then it pressed a Best Director Silver Bear upon Otar Iosseliani, the Franco-Georgian grand maitre who - poor man - has so constantly won runner-up festival prizes, especially at Venice (Favourites of the Moon, Brigands), that on the last near-miss occasion he poignantly said, "I try a little harder each time."

He can hardly grieve this year. His film Monday Morning also won the International Critics Prize. It is a charmer of heft and grace, though Iosseliani's plots are now becoming interchangeable. In each a bunch of sweet eccentrics lives in an old French mansion; one of them escapes briefly into the bigger world; then he/she comes back, sage but sad, realising that home is where you hang your hat and park your heart. This time the hero is a mid-life factory man, the getaway spot is Iosseliani's loved/hated Venice, and the funny-forlorn rhythms of his storytelling are as sure as ever. You must imagine some synthesis of Tati and Tarkovsky to get near Iosseliani's tone, combining a comical appraisal of life's absurdities - here including the brute universality of "No Smoking" signs for harmless weed-lovers - with long-take landscape meditations and rich but haiku-brief dialogue.

Best Actress Silver Bear went to America's Halle Berry for Monster's Ball, in which she pulls out emotional stops as a young black woman widowed by capital punishment. (Husband goes to electric chair. Fate pushes her into the arms of Death Row guard Billy Bob Thornton.) Best Actor prize was won by the splendid Jacques Gamblin who gives the kiss of life - a long French kiss probing parts that other tongues cannot reach - to Bertrand Tavernier's earnest but sometimes ponderous wartime tragicomedy Laisser Passer (Safe Conduct).

The festival ended, as it began, with a mini-blitzkrieg of films about the Nazi era. It is no good saying "Don't mention the war" in Berlin. Everyone mentions it. In the final 48 hours we were swept through Costa-Gavras's Amen, adapting Rolf Hochhuth's play The Representative, about the wartime Vatican's failure to condemn the Holocaust, and Istvan Szabo's Taking Sides, hauling another stage text on to the screen: Ronald Harwood's virtual two-hander between Wilhelm Furtwangler and the postwar Denazification Commission officer sent to hammer the truth out of history.

Was the great conductor a Nazi? Harvey Keitel's interrogator wastes no time being polite. "I'm gonna get that fuckin' bandleader!" - so much for the Berlin Philharmonic and its messianic maestro - and soon Keitel and Stellan Skarsgard are bareknuckle-debating in two terrific performances, though surrounded by less than terrific co-production values. (Discount back-projection, Babel accents in supporting roles.) The Costa-Gavras film also has a fiery acting core: Ulrich Tukur as Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer who tried to tip off the Allies about the death camps. Dramatic momentum is lost, though, with ill-focused Vatican scenes and a weak performance by co-lead Mathieu Kassowitz as Hochhuth's conscience-stricken Jesuit priest.

For the last word on Hitler and the second world war we turned to the closing-gala movie The Great Dictator. Chaplin's film was prophetic in 1940. It seems discerning beyond its years in 2002. Will its showing prompt Germany's premier film festival to close the book at last on the country's most blotted epoch? Possibly. But somehow, I suspect, not. It's hard to beat the habit of a lifetime.