Looking at the photos, the award ceremony in Venice does not seem to have been a happy affair. Pedro Almodóvar looks grumpily into the camera, and the jury president Isabelle Huppert looks as if she has fallen into the hands of a malicious packaging artist posing as a fashion designer. The prizes themselves gave little cause for joy. It came as it was bound to, Pedro Almodóvar won the Golden Lion with ‘The Room Next Door’, his weakest film for a long time. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore talk about friendship and euthanasia for 107 minutes and seem as lively as the decorative wallpaper in the background.
Nicole Kidman received the award for best actress, which was understandable given her strong presence in ‘Babygirl’. But does someone like Nicole Kidman need another award? It is regrettable that the favourite Fernanda Torres was left empty-handed. In any case, the film ‘I'm still here’ by Walter Salles, in which she plays the leading role - for many the most convincing entry in the competition - was only given the screenplay prize. (At least it won the prize of the Catholic SIGNIS jury, while the Protestant INTERFILM jury awarded the Swedish film ‘The Quiet Life’ from the Orizzonti competition with its prize for the Promotion of Interreligious Dialogue).
The jury also followed its strategy of honouring well-known names and not taking any risks with the award for best actor for Vincent Lindon, who is good in every role. The Prize for Best Direction for Brady Corbet and his three-and-a-half-hour architectural epic ‘The Brutalist’ is more than flattering. The Grand Jury Prize for 48-year-old Italian Maura Delpero is at least an honour for an unknown director. Her historical drama ‘Vermiglio’ about a village in the mountains of Trentino at the end of the Second World War looks like an ethnological documentary. The characters speak in a dialect that would be incomprehensible even to Italians without subtitles.
In contrast, the decisions for the prizes in the ‘Orizzonti’ section were very different, with the jury pursuing a bolder strategy. The main prize went to Bogdan Mureșanu's ironically playful cinema debut ‘The New Year That Never Came’ about a family at the end of the Ceauşescu regime in Romania. Jaffa-born Palestinian Scandar Copti was awarded the prize for best screenplay for his film ‘Happy Holidays’, a family story set in Haifa. In his acceptance speech, he referred to the ‘ongoing genocide in Gaza’.
The American Sarah Friedland also found strong words when she thanked the jury for the director's award for her feature film debut ‘Familiar Touch’, which is about a patient in a nursing home who suffers from dementia but is unshakeably self-confident. ‘As a Jewish American, I accept the award on the 336th day of Israel's genocide in Gaza and in the 76th year of the occupation. I believe it is our responsibility as filmmakers to use our opportunities to address Israel's impunity on the global stage. I stand here in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation.’