Pedro Almodóvar wins Venice Film Festival with The Room Next Door
The Venice Film Festival held its annual awards ceremony today, with the festival jury—led by Isabelle Huppert—naming their favorites from this year's crop of films. That includes a big win for veteran filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, whose new movie The Room Next Door, which stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, has taken home the Golden Lion for Best Film. (And yes, we know film festival award rankings are frequently inscrutable, but that's the really good one.)
The win was a slight upset, in so far as a lot of critics thought Brady Corbet's Adrien Brody drama The Brutalist was a lock for the win, but Corbet instead took home the Silver Lion for direction for his historical epic. Meanwhile the Grand Jury Prize—don't call it "second place"—went to writer-director Maura Delpero's rural family drama Vermiglio. And Special Jury Prize (third place, natch) went to April, from writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili, about a female abortion doctor who comes under investigation in her native Georgia.
In the individual categories, meanwhile, we have Corbet's win for directing, as well as a writing nod for Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega for Brazilian drama I'm Still Here. Nicole Kidman (not in attendance, due to the recent death of her mother) won Best Actress for her lead performance in Halina Reijn's Babygirl, while French actor Vincent Lindon, best known for his 2015 Cannes winner The Measure Of A Man, won Best Actor for his work in family drama The Quiet Son. And Venice's special prize for younger performers went to 22-year-old Paul Kircher, for his turn in French coming-of-age drama And Their Children After Them.