“The Room Next Door,” directed by Pedro Almodóvar, was awarded the Golden Lion for best film by a competition jury led by Isabelle Huppert at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on Saturday. In the film, a journalist (Tilda Swinton) suffering from cancer asks an old friend played by Julianne Moore to stay with her when she decides to take her own life.
“It’s my first movie in English, but the spirit is Spanish,” Almodóvar said of the adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel “What Are You Going Through.” While accepting the award, the acclaimed author called the decision to end life in the face of intractable pain a fundamental right.
Moore’s vigil with Swinton takes place in a rented house in upstate New York. Among the small cast are John Turturro as a former lover and Alessandro Nivola as a police investigator. Almodóvar won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 and, in 2021, opened the event with her film “Parallel Mothers” (for which Penélope Cruz won Best Actress).
The 81st edition of the festival opened with “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” the sequel to Tim Burton’s original 1988 supernatural comedy. Other notable films include “Maria,” “Queer,” “Babygirl,” “Joker: Folly a Deux,” “Wolfs,” “Cloud,” “April,” “Pavements,” “The Order” and “Horizon: An American happens Saga – Chapter Two.
Despite the scorching heat, the stars were back in full force in Venice after last year’s artists’ strike. The list of boldface names was significant: Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix, Angelina Jolie, Daniel Craig, Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Antonio Banderas, Cate Blanchett, Adrien Brody, Jude Law, Jenna Ortega, Winona Ryder, Kevin Costner, Michael Keaton. , Swinton and Moore.
The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize went to “Vermiglio,” an intimate period drama set in an Italian mountain village by Maura Delpero. Brady Corbett won the Silver Lion for best director for “The Brutalist,” a three-and-a-half-hour drama about a Hungarian Jewish architect in America. DA Kulumbegashvili won the Special Jury Prize for “April,” an acclaimed film about a Georgian doctor who performs abortions despite the procedure being banned.
The 21-feature competition resisted easy classification, as the prizes reflected. The festival also featured new series episodes, including Alfonso Cuarón’s drama “Disclaimer”; “M. Son of the Century,” a historical drama directed by Joe Wright; and the climate disaster story “Families Like Ours,” directed by Thomas Winterberg.
Kidman won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for her role in “Babygirl,” where she plays a tech executive who has an affair with an intern (Harris Dickinson). The film’s director, Halina Raine, accepted the award on Kidman’s behalf, reading a statement from the actress explaining that she had just learned of her mother’s death, and dedicated the honor to her, saying, “She shaped me, she guided me. gave. , and she made me.”
The best actor award went to Vincent Lindon, who plays the father of a young man drawn to far-right politics in “The Quiet Son.” Paul Kircher received the Marcello Mastroini Award, given to an outstanding emerging actor, for “And Their Children After Them”. Best screenplay honors went to Murillo Hauser and Heiter Lorega for “I’m Still Here,” which follows a family during a Brazilian dictatorship in the 1970s; Directed by Walter Salles (“Central Station”).
“Familiar Touch,” directed by Sarah Friedland, won both the Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Feature and the Best Director Award in the festival’s second competition slate, the Orizonti section. The film’s star, Kathleen Chalfant, won the Orizonti Award for Best Actress. “The New Year That Never Came” by Bogdan Muresanu won the top prize, and the section’s Special Jury Prize went to “One of Those Days When Hemme Dies” by Murat Firatoglu.
This year’s Golden Lions went to Sigourney Weaver and director Peter Weir for lifetime achievement. The Glory to the Filmmaker award went to Claude Lelouch, whose new film “Finally” was kicked out of the competition.
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