BERLIN - "Touch Me Not", an experimental Romanian docudrama won the Golden Bear top prize at the Berlin film festival Sunday in a strong year for female filmmakers and women's stories.

US filmmaker Wes Anderson clinched the best director Silver Bear prize for "Isle of Dogs", an animated allegory with political bite and an early favourite among the 19 contenders.

Actor Bill Murray, who voices one of the pack of pooches in Anderson's first animated feature since 2009's "Fantastic Mr Fox", picked up the award for Anderson.

"I never thought that I would go to work as a dog and come home with a bear," he quipped.

"Ich bin ein Berliner Hund (I am a Berlin dog)," he added, riffing on John F. Kennedy's famous speech.

The runner-up Grand Jury Prize went to Polish social satire "Mug" by Malgorzata Szumowska, the second winner among four women in competition.

It tells the story of a man who is shunned by his community when he has a face transplant after a horrific accident, in a plot examining tensions over identity and exclusion in eastern Europe.

Szumowska said the film "reflected problems not only in my own country" but around the world.

"I am so happy that I am a female director, yeah!" she added.

Ana Brun of Paraguay won the Silver Bear prize for best actress for her role in "The Heiresses" where her partner has to go to prison for their spiraling debts.

"I'd like to dedicate this prize to the women of my country, who are fighters," she said.

France's Anthony Bajon won best actor for an emotionally raw portrayal of a young man struggling to beat his drug addiction at a Catholic Alpine retreat in Cedric Kahn's "The Prayer".

"Museum" from Mexico, starring Gael Garcia Bernal in the true story of a daring 1985 heist by two students at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, bagged the best screenplay award.

Austria's "The Waldheim Waltz" by Ruth Beckermann about the scandal surrounding the Nazi past of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim claimed the best documentary prize.

Despite critical accolades, wrenching drama "U-July 22" about the mass murder of 69 mainly teenage victims on the Norwegian island of Utoya by far-right militant Anders Behring Breivik in 2011, left the ceremony empty-handed. - AFP