Venice Film Festival: the Golden Lion awarded to a documentary on the scourge of opiates

Published on: 09/10/2022 – 22:53 The documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” by American Laura Poitras was crowned Saturday with a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. French filmmaker Alice Diop is not to be outdone with two awards received for her film “Saint-Omer”. The Venice Film Festival shone the spotlight on the drama of opiates by crowning, on Saturday September 10, a documentary on photographer Nan Goldin and her fierce fight against this health scandal which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States. jury chaired by actress Julianne Moore awarded its Golden Lion to the director, Laura Poitras, 58, and thus crowns a third director in a row, after the French Audrey Diwan last year (“L’Évènement” ) and the Chinese-American Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) in 2020. Above all, he distinguishes a pugnacious personality who relentlessly probes the gray areas of America: after having worked on the American occupation in Iraq then Guantanamo, she becomes the confidante of whistleblower Edward Snowden and directs “Citizenfour” (2015), which wins the Oscar for best documentary. but a journey through the life ofNan Goldin, a 68-year-old photographer known for her shots of the New York underground and who has seen so much death, from AIDS to the opiate crisis, her last fight. Because Nan Goldin, who had left Venice and could not come for his prize, took the lead in a David vs. Goliath battle against the Sackler family, leading producers of opiates, painkillers that have addicted and killed half a million Americans over the past two decades.Double victory for the French Alice Diop”I have known many brave people in my life, but no one like (Nan Goldin), who fought this very powerful family”, declared the director while receiving her award. French filmmaker Alice Diop did a double on Saturday in Venice by winning the Grand Jury Prize and the first film prize for her first fiction, “Saint Omer”, inspired by a news item and the trial that followed. I have no more words,” said the filmmaker, very moved, receiving her prize and highlighting her feminist fight, in particular that of “women of color”: “Silence will not protect us. We will not be silent any more”, she promised. Inspired by a true story of a trial for infanticide, “Saint-Omer” seeks to explore “the great universal question” of our “relationship to motherhood”. Laurence Coly , the film’s protagonist played by Guslagie Malanda, is a Senegalese immigrant accused of having killed her 15-month-old baby by abandoning her on a beach in northern France at high tide Jafar Panahi imprisoned in Iran and awarded in Venice The Venice jury sent another political signal by awarding a Special Prize to director Jafar Panahi, showing that cinema would not bow to censorship in Iran and offering its support to a filmmaker who pays with his freedom for his desire to create.Lion gold in 2000 with “Le Cercle”, Panahi is the only filmmaker in competition not to have been able to walk the red carpet, imprisoned since July by the mullahs’ regime. In “No Bears” (“The Bears do not exist pas”), the award-winning film, he puts his own situation in abyss, a foot of n ez brilliant at censorship. But the Venetian ceremony, which acts as a launching pad for the Oscars, after the “success stories” of films like “Nomadland” by Chloé Zhao, Golden Lion in 2020 or “Roma” by Alfonso Cuaron, two years prior, hasn’t forgotten the glamour, however. The acting awards went to red carpet stars Cate Blanchett (“Tár”) and Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) .No reward for Netflix On the other hand, the prize list sounds like a slap in the face for the online video giant Netflix, in search of cinephile legitimacy in Venice. Deprived of Cannes competition because his films are not released in theaters, he has his napkin ring on the Lido where he presented no less than four films. Neither the performance of Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in the biopic “Blonde”, in line at the end of September, nor the excess of the Frenchman Romain Gavras in his description of the insurrection of a suburb (“Athena”) convinced the jury. No more than the Mexican Alejandro González Iñárritu, who lost the spectators in the meanders of his “Bardo”, or the American Noah Baumbach, who did not find the charm of his previous films with “White Noise”.With AFP