The news that American film director Steven Spielberg has received a lifetime achievement award from a major festival comes as no surprise.
What is surprising is that this festival is the Berlinale.
Because Spielberg was only very rarely a guest here - in 1988 with "Das Reich der Sonne" and eleven years later with Dominik Moll's documentary "The Last Days", which he had co-produced.
Andrew Kilb
Feature correspondent in Berlin.
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Like the other festivals, Spielberg's cinema never used the Berlinale as a showcase because it always sought the direct route to the audience;
since his box-office success with Jaws in 1975, all of his films have been designed for mass appeal, although his visual dialogue with viewers has taken on a responsible-ethical undertone since Schindler's List.
But in the same year 1993 "Jurassic Park" was released, and this tension between commerce and cinematic morality determined his life's work as a whole.
No director has won more Oscars, Golden Globes and other awards than he;
At the same time, no one else has made such a decisive mark on the politics of remembrance as Spielberg did with the founding of his Shoah Foundation.
His adventure blockbusters have become historical
In his best films, which in addition to "Schindler's List" also include "Saving Private Ryan", "Munich" and "Lincoln", historical awareness and technical perfection meet.
They are the enduring part of his filmography, while the form of the adventure blockbuster with a star cast and a huge budget, which Spielberg mastered with the "Indiana Jones" series and the first two "Jurassic Park" films as virtuously as few in Hollywood, meanwhile has become historical.
In addition to the Honorary Golden Bear, the Berlinale also dedicates a homage series to the director with several of his films.
There will also be a special screening of his latest work, The Fabelmans, the story of a Jewish-American childhood in the 1950s that takes Spielberg back to his own early days.