08/09/2007

Two years after Brokeback Mountain, director Ang Lee – who returned to Taiwan after years of working in the US – has picked up his second Golden Lion. The heated melodrama Lust, Caution!, presented early on in the festival, resisted the competition of many titles loved by critics and the public alike, repeating the success of the gay western and has made Lee the first filmmaker to have won the festival with two films in different languages. The film also won Rodrigo Prieto the Osella for Best Cinematography.

The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Brian De Palma for Redacted. On the Lido last year with The Black Dahlia, the director’s new film is a complex accusation against the war in Iraq, shot in digital, which simulates soldiers’ videos and television broadcasts.

Much loved by audiences and critics, Abdellatif Kechiche won the Special Jury Prize for <La Graine et le mulet [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hafsia Herzi
film profile]. The award is definitive consecration for the French-Tunisian filmmaker, a prize-winner at Venice with his debut film Blame it on Voltaire, after the international success of Games of Love and Chance [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. This film on the dreams of a Maghreb family also won Hafsia Herzi the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Debut Actor.

Kechiche shared the ex-aequo prize with Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, the biographical puzzle on the life of Bob Dylan featuring Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett, who won the Best Actress Volpi Cup for her cross-gender role in the film.

Best Actor went to Brad Pitt, the star of the western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Andrew Dominik, despite rumours that the prize would go to his co-star Casey Affleck.

Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, winner of the 1990 Golden Lion for Urga, was presented with the Special Golden Lion for his body of work, given to not exclude from the shortlist the second to last competition title, 12, very well received by Lido audiences.

The Osella for Best Screenplay went to Paul Laverty for his latest collaboration with Ken Loach, It's a Free World... [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a harsh indictment of the contemporary working world after The Wind That Shakes the Barley [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ken Loach
interview: Rebecca O’Brien
film profile], last year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes.

The Future Lion for a best debut film was given to Rodrigo Plá’s The Zone [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a Spanish-Mexican co-production that screened in Venice Days.

In Horizons, the best film was deemed to be Estonian title Autumn Ball [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Veiko Õunpuu, while Useless by Jia Zhangke (winner of the Golden Lion last year for Still Life) picked up the section’s best documentary prize. Special mention was also given to Death in the Land of Encantos by Lav Diaz, a nine-hour film on the typhoon that shook the Philippines in 2006.

In Corto Cortissimo, the Silver Lion for Best Short Film went to the UK’s Dogaltogether by Paddy Considine (with a special mention for Russian director Leonid Rybakov’s Stone People), while the Prix UIP for Best European Short was given to Spanish title Alumbramiento by Eduardo Chapero-Jackson.

(Translated from Italian)