Venice Film Festival 2019: the awards | Little White Lies

Festivals

Venice Film Fes­ti­val 2019: the awards

07 Sep 2019

Words by David Jenkins

A man with dark hair and eyes, shouting passionately, lit by a warm, orange glow.
A man with dark hair and eyes, shouting passionately, lit by a warm, orange glow.
As Lucre­cia Martel’s jury deliv­er their ver­dict, here’s a run­down of all who won the big prizes on the Lido this year.

In the world of cin­e­ma, there are but three major fes­ti­vals which, for rea­sons known only to the film indus­try, lord above all oth­ers. That’s Berlin, which hap­pens in Feb­ru­ary. Cannes, which is May. And Venice, which is August. And the prize announce­ment at Venice, in its own way, caps off anoth­er year of world cin­e­ma world pre­mieres, with a few scat­tered titles yet to descend from the chute as fes­ti­val sea­son merges into award season.

The 2019 Venice Fes­ti­val was not, alas, a vin­tage year in terms of its main com­pe­ti­tion slate. True, it offered a palm­ful of extreme­ly great films, such as James Gray’s Ad Astra and Roy Andersson’s About End­less­ness, some excel­lent ones such as Václav Marhoul divi­sive The Paint­ed Bird, Pablo Larrain’s Ema and Noah Baumbach’s Mar­riage Sto­ry, and some titles which will cer­tain­ly make per­son­al top 10 lists come tab­u­la­tion sea­son, such as Shan­non Murphy’s Babyteeth.

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Lucre­cia Mar­tel head­ed up this year’s main jury, and the mak­er of Zama and The Head­less Woman doesn’t make guess­work easy when it comes to pre­dict­ing the main prizes. To be hon­est, pri­or to the announce­ment, I had absolute­ly no idea which way things were going to go, main­ly due to the fact that the com­pe­ti­tion con­sist­ed of such a styl­is­ti­cal­ly diverse crop of films, that com­par­ing them to one anoth­er was a fool’s errand.

And this is, per­haps in all my years as a film jour­nal­ist, the strangest, most obtuse set of awards pos­si­ble. I mean, real­ly, real­ly weird. The only film we real­ly cared for on this list is Andersson’s impec­ca­ble About End­less­ness. Jok­er, mean­while, is godaw­ful. It took the main prize. Hap­py awards season!

Gold­en Lion: Jok­er by Todd Phillips. Our review
Sil­ver Lion: An Offi­cer and a Spy by Roman Polan­s­ki
Sil­ver Lion best direc­tor: Roy Ander­s­son for About End­less­ness. Our review
Best Actress: Ari­ane Ascar­di for Glo­ria Mun­di
Best Actor: Luca Marinel­li for Mar­tin Eden
Best Screen­play: No. 7 Cher­ry Lane by Yon­fan
Spe­cial Jury Prize: The Mafia is No Longer What it Used to Be by Fran­co Maresco
Mar­cel­lo Mas­troian­ni Award for new tal­ent: Toby Wal­lace, Baby­teeth. Our review

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