For the third consecutive year, Venice Film Festival has awarded its top prize, the Golden Lion, to a film by a woman director. Following in the footsteps of Chloé Zhao in 2020 (“Nomadland”) and Audrey Diwan in 2021 (“Happening”), Laura Poitras landed the award for “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a doc about artist Nan Goldin and her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in the opioid epidemic.
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is also screening at Toronto and will serve as New York Film Festival’s (NYFF) Centerpiece film. Film rights to the pic have been acquired by Neon, while HBO landed TV and streaming rights.
Another festival darling, Alice Diop’s courtroom drama “Saint Omer,” received Venice’s Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize. It also won the Horizons section’s Lion of the Future aka the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a Debut Film. “Saint Omer,” too, is screening at TIFF and will be making its way to NYFF later this month.
Other notable Venice wins include Best Actress, which went to Cate Blanchett for “Tár,” a portrait of a genius, pioneering conductor-composer, and Taylor Russell receiving the Marcello Mastroianni Award for for Best New Young Actor or Actress for cannibalism romance “Bones and All.”
Among the big Horizons winners are “Vera,” a drama about a high-society woman who befriends the child she injures in a traffic accident, as well as his father. Tizza Covi, who took home Best Director for the film, alongside her co-director Rainer Frimmel, and Vera Gemma nabbed Best Actress for her leading turn. Soudade Kaadan received Horizons Extra’s Audience Award for “Nezouh,” the story of a Syrian teen whose world unexpectedly expands when a bomb rips a huge hole in the roof of her family home.
As for the Venice Classics section, KD Davison won Best Documentary for “Fragments of Paradise,” which focuses on the avant-garde poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas.
