There were also several Australian short films in Native, a section devised by outgoing artistic director Dieter Kosslick to show cinema made within indigenous communities: Erica Glynn's She Who Must Be Obeyed, about the artist's mother, and Melbourne filmmaker Amie Batalibasi's Blackbird, about slavery in the Australian canefields in the 19th century. Native also showed the 2015 Australian film Tanna, a Romeo and Juliet story shot in a traditional village in Vanuatu by Martin Butler and Bentley Dean.

Admittedly, you have to search out some of these screenings. Both Rotterdam and Berlin have programmes of hundreds of films that are universally agreed to be unmanageably huge, despite efforts to cut them back, and which are divided into sections that are often difficult to distinguish from each other. Rotterdam in particular has a bent towards experimental film, while its Hubert Bals fund – named for its founding director – puts seeding and completion money into films in (mostly) poorer countries where there are no funding agencies for independent cinema.

There are some murmurs that the results tend to have a uniform realist worthiness, but a striking number of MIFF and Australian arthouse regulars – Pablo Larrain, Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethaku, Sergei Loznitsa – have been helped along the way by Rotterdam.

Berlin also has a stringently experimental side in its Forum section, which this year showed Australia's trailblazing experimentalists Arthur and Corinne Cantrill's 1981 luminous The Second Journey (to Uluru). Also in Forum Expanded was the half-hour art piece The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, shot by the Northern Territory-based Karrabing Film Collective. The festival's more pronounced orientation, however, has always been a political one, partly because its location for so long made it a primary portal to culture from the communist countries of Eastern Europe.

With courageous steadfastness he has given freedom of art a stage and a cinema screen to politically persecuted artists.

State Minister for Culture Monika Grutters

Kosslick took over the reins in 2001, well after the fall of the Wall, but he has preserved that sense of engagement in other ways, such as Native, a programme of festival films that is taken out to Berlin's more remote and more diverse districts and culinary initiatives like last year's kitchens run by refugees. In a farewell speech on the closing night, the State Minister for Culture, Monika Grutters, praised his commitment.

"With courageous steadfastness he has given freedom of art a stage and a cinema screen to politically persecuted artists," she said. "It is to his personal credit that he has always inspired a huge audience and whetted their appetite for great cinema."

This is debatable; local critics had much more regard for Kosslick's ability to maintain the festival's funding than his film knowledge. He is to be succeeded by Carlo Chatrian, a reassuringly scruffy, serious critic who was until recently the director of the Locarno Festival in Switzerland.

Chatrian has certainly improved the popular evening programme in Locarno's piazza; it is hoped he will do the same in Berlin, where recent years have seen a lot of second-string Hollywood-ish productions given plum evening spots in Berlin for the sake of red-carpet star power. This year's opening night film, for example – Danish director Lone Scherfig's The Kindness of Strangers, about a homeless woman and her children who find shelter in a Russian tea room in New York – was panned by most critics as sentimental nonsense but brought Zoe Kazan, Bill Nighy, Andrea Riseborough and Caleb Landry Jones to the city.

The indifferent spy thriller The Operative, shown later in the festival, was a front-page opportunity for glamorous home-grown star Diane Kruger and Martin Freeman, whose presence put local Sherlock fans into a spin. All festivals do this to a degree, but the Berlinale's notably cerebral film community has little tolerance for it.

The Berlinale prizewinners, chosen by a jury headed by French actress Juliette Binoche, were of a different stamp. The Golden Bear went to the Israeli director Nadav Lapid's Synonymes, about a young Israeli man who rejects his country's military culture for a different – but still difficult – life in Paris.

Silver Bears went to Francois Ozon's brisk By the Grace of God, a factually based story about group of adults abused by priests intent on bringing offenders to justice, to German filmmaker Angela Schanelec for the family drama I Was At Home, But and to actors Wang Jingchun and Yong Mei from a long but riveting film about the human cost of China's one-child policy, Wang Xiaoshuai's So Long, My Son.

Another highly anticipated Chinese film, Zhang Yimou's One Second, was pulled from the festival a day before it was supposed to screen, supposedly due to "technical difficulties". The difficulties seemed to be to do with the complicated system of censorship stamps and exit visas any Chinese film requires, given that local selectors had seen the film running perfectly well.

Or they may have to do with the subject matter: the Cultural Revolution. Whichever it is, the Berlinale's long-standing role as a window on to cultures that are closed or often ignored, like many of those in the Native section, certainly isn't exhausted. Given the state of things, it may have only just begun.