This year marks the 73rd anniversary of the Venice Film Festival, currently drawing to a close in Venice, Italy. The festival is typically one of the utmost class, usually rewarding the more challenging and art-forward pieces of international cinema.
The festival’s highest honor is The Golden Lion (VFF’s version of the Palme D’Or), and this year, said feline was granted to a four-hour, black-and-white Filipino drama called The Woman Who Left, a film directed by Lav Diaz. The Woman Who Left is about a schoolteacher who was wrongfully imprisoned for 30 years, and who must slowly re-climatize to life outside of prison. The film has yet to have an international distributor, but will likely make it’s way to the United States within a year.
The Grand Jury Prize was awarded to Tom Ford’s drama Nocturnal Animals, a film about a woman who begins to suspect her ex-husband’s thriller novel might be a veiled threat. This is Tom Ford’s second film after A Single Man.
The Best Director prize was a tie between Amat Escalante, the Mexican director behind The Untamed, and well-established Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky (Tango & Cash, Runaway Train) whose new film is a Holocaust drama called Paradise.
Ana Lily Amirpour, the director of the excellent vampire indie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, won the Special Jury Prize for her oblique cannibal Texan romance The Bad Batch, a film with Jason Momoa, Jim Carrey, and Keanu Reeves. You can read William Bibbiani’s review of The Bad Batch here.
Best Actress went to Emma Stone for La La Land, a musical about old-world Los Angeles. Best actor went to Oscar Martinez, the star of the Argentinian film The Distinguished Citizen, a film about a Nobel-winning author. Noah Oppenheim won Best Screenplay for Jackie, a film about Mrs. Kennedy. Best director went to Fien Troch, a Belgian director who made a film called Home (not to be confused with the 2015 animated feature, or the 2016 American horror film).
Annapurna Pictures
There is also a special sub-section of winners at Venice who win under the banner of Horizons, given to espeically edgy films. The winners of Horizons are as follows:
BEST FILM: “Liberami” (dir. Federica di Giacomo)
SPECIAL JURY PRIZE: “Big Big World” (dir. Reha Erdam)
SPECIAL PRIZE FOR BEST ACTOR: Nuno Lopes (“Sao Jorge,” dir. Marco Martins)
SPECIAL PRIZE FOR BEST ACTRESS: Ruth Diaz (“The Fury of a Patient Man,” dir. Raul Arevalo)
BEST SCREENPLAY: “Bitter Money” (dir. Wang Bing)
BEST SHORT: “La Voz Perdida” (dir. Marcelo Mantinessi)
Other awards include:
BEST DOCUMENTARY ON CINEMA: “Le Councours” (dir. Claire Simon)
BEST RESTORED FILM: “Break-Up — L’uomo dei cinque palloni,” (dir. Marco Ferreri)
Top Image Courtesy the Venice Film Festival
Witney Seibold is a longtime contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
