Madame Morrible is a Golden Bear Award winner.
Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh added another prestigious award to her collection on Wednesday night in a rainy day in Berlin, when she was presented with the honorary Golden Bear Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival.
“A lifetime’s achievement is a very big word. It sounds like a conclusion, but I like to think of it as pausing, taking a breath, looking back, and then continuing to move forward. Carefully, of course, so no one takes this bear back.” She spoke while watching a montage of clips from her own films, including “The Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, “The Lady” and her earlier Hong Kong action classics.
Yeo said the Berlinale “meant more to me than words can express,” adding that the early welcome was important: “Berlin welcomed me when I was still looking for my place.” “That said, as artists continue to come into themselves, there’s room for voices from the margins. I’m grateful to be able to say that I’m still coming into myself, maybe a little slower now, but still stubborn.
Looking back on her own youth, Yeh claimed, “I never imagined that a girl from Malaysia who loved discipline and dance and dreamed endlessly would travel so far through her stories.”
“My journey thus far has transcended languages and cultures, continents and genres, sometimes gracefully, sometimes a little painfully, but always guided by curiosity and a deep faith in cinema. Cinema has become a place where I can play contradictions, strengths and weaknesses, seriousness, control and surrender. It has given me not only a career, but a life much bigger than I ever imagined.”
Yeoh claimed that the Golden Bear belongs to “every director who took a chance, every producer who believed in him, every co-star who became family, and every staff member whose artistry quietly resides in every frame,” with a special mention to his late father.
“I carry him with me. His discipline, his steadfastness, his belief that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing. If he saw me standing here tonight holding this golden bear, I’m sure he’d smile.”
Sean Baker, who presented the award, claimed to have first seen Yeo in the 1987 kung fu film Dynamite Fighters, admitting that he was “probably watching a bootleg tape that was highly questionable”.
The Anora director, who recently collaborated with Yeo on the short film Sandiwara, described the star as “a once-in-a-generation screen presence, the kind of star who not only appears in a movie, but redefines the temperature in the room. When she walks on screen, you feel the temperature change.”
Upon accepting the award from director Baker, Yeoh said that he would love to work with him again, but added, “There will be no sex scenes.”
