September 10, 2022, 10:53 PM
September 10, 2022, 10:53 PM
The Venice Film Festival awarded this Saturday the Golden Lion to a strongly political documentary by Laura Poitras that denounces the tragedy of opiates and the scandal in the United States for deliberately fueling drug dependency.
The jury chaired by actress Julianne Moore awarded the highest award to the work of Poitras, 58, based on the figure of the photographer and activist Nan Goldin, the queen of the New York “underground” in the 70s/80s.
This is the third time in a row that a woman has received the Golden Lion after France’s Audrey Diwan last year (“L’Evènement”) and Chinese-American Chloé Zhao (“Land of Nomads”) in 2020.
The jury, which included the Argentine director and writer Mariano Cohn, awarded a combative personality, who has investigated and denounced sensitive issues in the United Stateslike the occupation of Iraq and the horrors at Guantanamo.
The director won her second prestigious award after the Oscar for the documentary “Citizenfour” (2015), produced together with the ‘alert launcher’ Edward Snowden.
With the title “All Beauty and Blood”, Poitras also becomes the seventh woman to obtain the prestigious Venetian Lion.
The jury wanted to send another strong and political message by awarding the Special Award to the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is detained in his country for protesting against the arrest of two colleagues by the Islamist regime.
In “No Bears” (the bears do not exist), the filmmaker, who had already been awarded in Venice in 2000 for “The circle”makes fun of censorship and at the same time paints a portrait of his condition as a persecuted artist.
Big stars, slap for Netflix
Venice, which in recent years was a springboard for a successful career in the United States, left this time without a prize for Netflix blockbusters, which do not come out in theaters. Among the ignored films is “Bardo”, by the Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu, which divided the critics.
The second most important prize, the Silver Lion, was awarded to French film director Alice Diop, of Senegalese parents, for “Saint Omer”, a film about motherhood, loneliness, postpartum depression, based on real events, a trial for infanticide in the north of France.
“Saint Omer” also won the Lion of the Future for best first film.
Two Hollywood stars, Australia’s Cate Blanchett (“Tár”) and Ireland’s Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), received the awards for best actress and best actor.
The award for Farrell, 46, marks a kind of artistic reconversion of the actor in auteur cinema.
Blanchett, 53, conquered the Lido by putting her fame and talent at the service of the feminist struggle with her performance as an orchestra director in “TAR”, by Todd Field, a drama about the abuse of power, female homosexuality, ethics and prejudice, a kind of “Me too” in a feminine key.
Left out of the list of winners was the moving “Argentina, 1985”, by Argentinean Santiago Mitre, with a praised Ricardo Darín in the role of prosecutor Julio Strassera, in charge of the trial against the Military Juntas (1976-1983).
The jury of the Horizontes section, the most innovative of the contest, instead awarded the screenplay for the film “Blanquita”, by the Chilean Fernando Guzzonibased on the true story of a powerful pedophile network in Chile.
