The Sackler family is one of the richest in the world. She owns the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, a money-making machine thanks to its star drug, OxyContin. It is a highly addictive drug, which was marketed without disclosing that it caused dependency. Half a million Americans have died after getting hooked on that opiate. But the Sacklers are still very rich. The activist Nan Goldin has been denouncing the Sackler family for years and now the filmmaker Laura Poitras has joined him in that battle with the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which today gave the surprise by winning the Golden Lion at the 79 Venice Show.
The jury, chaired by the actress Julianne Moore and also includes Leonardo Di Costanzo, Audrey Diwan, Lila Hatami, Kazuo Ishiguro and Rodrigo Sorogoyen, has risked and pays the controversy with that Golden Lion for a documentary film in a year in which the competition had fiction level films.
Alice Diop has won the Silver Lion for Best Director for Saint Omer, which recounts how the young novelist Rama attends the trial of Laurence Coly, a girl accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter by abandoning her at high tide in a beach in northern France. But as the trial progresses, the defendants' words and testimonies shake Rama's convictions. Diop, a French daughter of Senegalese, based herself on a real trial she attended in 2016 to write the script for the film, also fed "by an imagination that summoned mythological figures such as Medea" and with the intention of "probing the unspeakable mystery of mothers ".
The Silver Lion has gone to Luca Guadagnino, who has returned to have Timothée Chalamet after the success of Call Me by Your Name (2017). Although their new work together, Bones and All, has not caused the same sensation, the jury has decided to reward this rather bloody story that tells how Maren (Taylor Russell), a young woman who learns to survive on the margins of society, and Lee , a disenfranchised drifter, are joined on a thousand-mile odyssey that takes them through the back roads, hidden passageways, and trapdoors of Ronald Reagan's America. But despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying past. Taylor Russell has won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Emerging Performance for her role in this film.
Jafar Panahi has not been able to collect the special jury prize for No Bears because he is in jail. The Iranian regime put him in prison last July to serve a six-year sentence. The Venice Festival with its director, Alberto Barberá, at the head has turned to request the release of Panahi. But, in addition, No Bears has been liked a lot. The film deals with two love stories. It recounts how a film director who is prohibited from leaving his country, played by Panahi himself, remote-directs a film that is being shot on the border with Turkey while a couple lives their own drama in their place of residence.
Martín McDonagh has won the award for best screenplay for The Banshees of Inisherin, a very black comedy that he has written and directed. The film is set on a small Irish island off the coast of Galway in 1923. Ireland is immersed in a civil war, but the inhabitants of the island do not care, they live quietly and isolated dedicated to the care of their animals. Until the conflict breaks out between two old friends that leads to terrible events. The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh's first work since the celebrated Three Billboards Outside (2017), drinks from The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952), but goes much further, because it is full of tasty dialogue loaded with black humor that do not leave the viewer indifferent.
Colin Farell has snatched the Coppa Volpi for Best Male Performance from Brendan Freser for his role in this film where he plays Padraic, who is Colm's lifelong friend. Since time immemorial, they meet every day in the pub and spend the afternoon between pints of beer. But one morning, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) refuses to accompany Padraic to the pub. He has decided to end his long and great friendship. He doesn't explain. He acknowledges that his former friend has not offended or annoyed him and, upon Padraic's insistence, he confesses that he just finds it boring now.
Although Cate Blanchett came up with a great rival at the last moment, Ana de Armas, who shines as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, in the end the Australian actress was the winner of the Coppa Volpi for her composition of a famous orchestra conductor passing by from everything to nothing when it is discovered that he has harassed his students at Todd Field's Tár conservatory. "This film has changed my life, not only as an actress, but also as a human being," said Blanchett, who earns points to obtain an Oscar nomination, after receiving this award.
