Almodóvar Wins Golden Lion for ‘The Room Next Door’
Other top winners include Brady Corbet (Silver Lion for best director for ‘The Brutalist’), Nicole Kidman (best actress for ‘Babygirl’) and Vincent Lindon (best actor for ‘The Quiet Son’).
The 2024 Venice Film Fest awards ceremony wrapped up after 10 exciting days.
The prestigious Golden Lion award for best film went to Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door.
The Spaniard’s first-ever English-language feature received unprecedented 17-minute standing ovation when it premiered at the festival.
Almodóvar said in his acceptance speech: “I would like to dedicate it to my family, who is here now… This movie The Room Next Door, it is my first movie in English.. but the spirit is Spanish.”
The Silver Lion best director prize went to Brady Corbet for his three-and-a-half-hour epic The brutalist, starring Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones. The feature, a biopic on an imaginary Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor, László Tóth, who immigrates to the postwar U.S., was widely considered the critics’ favorite at Venice this year.
Nicole Kidman earned the best actress award for her role in the erotic thriller Babygirl opposite Antonio Banderas and Harris Dickinson, which confirmed that this year’s Venice edition had many movies about sex.
But Kidman wasn’t able to accept the award herself as her mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, has died, director Halina Reijn revealed when she accepted the award on Kidman’s behalf. Reijn read remarks from Kidman that said in part, “I’m in shock and I have to go to my family, but this award is for her… I am beyond grateful that I get to say her name to all of you. The collision of life and art is heartbreaking and my heart is broken.”
The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize went to Vermiglio by Maura Delpero. Vincent Lindon won best actor for his performance in The Quiet Son, about a father and son separated by their political ideologies.
The Special Jury Prize went to April, directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili.
Friedland won the Orizzonti (Horizons) best director and best debut film, the Lion of the Future prize, with Familiar Touch. She used her acceptance speech to tell the audience: “I’m accepting this award on the 76th anniversary of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. … I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their struggle for liberation.”
In the Venice Classics section, best restored film went to Nanni Moretti for Ecco Bombo.
The world’s oldest film festival premiered Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Pablo Larraín’s Maria, starring Angelina Jolie.
George Clooney and Brad Pitt whipped fans into a frenzy with the premiere of the crowd-pleasing Wolfs.
Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig teamed up to debut Queer.
and Todd Phillips’ sequel Joker: Folie à Deux, with Lady Gaga and Oscar winner Joaquin Phenix, rounded out the heavy hitters Wednesday night.
Alberto Barbera, the long-running director of Venice Fest, pulled off a top-shelf line-up for this year’s 81st edition of the event, which ran August 28-September 7.
Documentaries
On the documentary side, there was Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ music doc One to One: John & Yoko, which focuses on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s historic 1972 concerts at Madison Square Garden; 2073 from Amy and Senna filmmaker Asif Kapadia; Separated from The Fog of War director Errol Morris; and Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl, a look at notorious German documentarian Leni Riefenstahl.
Justin Kurzel’s new feature, The Order, a thriller about a group of bank-robbing white supremacists in the Pacific Northwest, had Nicholas Hoult, Jude Law and Tye Sheridan on the Lido, too, finishing up with an applause that went on more than seven minutes.
