Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras surprisingly won at the Venice Film Festival with her portrait of activist artist Nan Goldin. Also well-deserved honors for the acting performances of Cate Blanchett and Colin Farrell.
All the beauty and the bloodshed” is the title Laura Poitras gave to her documentary film, which has now won the 79th festival edition in Venice – and the US director is by no means referring to the stuff that great cinema is usually made of. The title is not to be understood metaphorically, but rather deadly seriously: beauty and death go hand in hand in the work of the Sackler family of pharmaceutical producers. She has supported major art museums for generations, and entire wings of the building bear her name. Of course, the patronage is backed by shameful business practices: by aggressively marketing the addictive painkiller oxycodone, your Purdue group put up with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Photo artist Nan Goldin, who the film portrays in her successful campaign against the Sacklers, was an addict herself for several years. Unlike the protagonists of Poitra’s earlier political documentaries, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, at least Goldin does not have to fear being punished for her heroic courage. Despite all the suffering that this film tells about, their political success is transmitted to the audience in a motivating way.
This formally unobtrusive documentary film reveals its artistic quality at second glance – in a montage that tells art and politics seamlessly in one. For Poitras, political and artistic ethics are inseparable – which, in contrast, makes the Sacklers’ double standards appear even more eerie.
As early as 1998, at the height of her success in the art world, Goldin told us in an FR interview: “I really believed up until 1989 that the art world was about art. Only then did I realize that it was all about money. It was like a trip from hell for me. That moment was terrifying for me. I still sell a painting cheaply at every exhibition so the difference can go to an AIDS clinic or a New York high school for gay and lesbian youth, where I sometimes teach. I have 500 pictures auctioned off for the AIDS Foundation every year. No, I don’t think I’ve sold myself to the art market.”
If Julianne Moore’s festival jury has now honored the only documentary film in the competition with one of the most important prizes for film art in the world, then she had artistic as well as political reasons for doing so. Just as she especially rewarded political art among her other works. The French contribution “Saint Omer”, now honored with the second most important award, the “grand jury prize”, is the first feature film by documentary filmmaker Alice Diop. Largely staged as a courtroom film, the drama follows what is known in France as the “Kabou Affair” of a former philosophy student who allowed her baby to drown in the sea.
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Golden Lion for Best Picture: “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” by Laura Poitras
Grand Jury Prize: Alice Diop for “Saint Omer”
Silver Lion for Best Director: Luca Guadagnino for “Bones and All”
Special Jury Prize: “No Bears” by Jafar Panahi
Best Screenplay Award: Martin McDonagh for The Banshees of Inisherin
Best Actress Award: Cate Blanchett for Todd Field’s “Tár”.
Best Actor Award: Colin Farrell for Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin
Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor: Taylor Russell in “Bones and All” by Luca Guadagnino
“Luigi De Laurentiis” award (best debut film): “Saint Omer” by Alice Diop (dpa)
Diop, who followed the process herself in 2017, quotes works by Marguerite Duras and Pier Paolo Pasolini in the film’s strict, semi-documentary form. By inserting the autobiographical role of the observer as a distancing element, she succeeds in breaking with the conventions of courtroom drama.
An award for the imprisoned Iranian director Jafar Panahi was expected. His equally complex and light-handed reflection on the role of a director in a society paralyzed between dictatorship and false tradition, “No Bears”, has now received the “Special Jury Prize”. And Todd Field’s controversial examination of sexual abuse in the cultural sector, the bitter satire “Tár”, was also honored. Cate Blanchett was called back to the Lido as “Best Actress” and first thanked her partner, who led the ensemble, “Nina Hoss, who I really admire.”
Even if the jury overlooked the brightest jewel of this good vintage – the Japanese contribution “Love Life” by Koji Fukada – they showed good taste throughout. With the often underestimated Colin Farrell, she paid tribute to a leading actor, without whose fine emotionality the story of a tragic male friendship, “The Banshees of Inisherin”, would probably have remained just bizarre.
Finally, the high esteem in which a radical genre film was held is absolutely justified: the Italian Luca Guadagnino received the director’s prize for “Bones and All”, a love story among cannibals, and the dazzlingly present young star Taylor Russell was awarded the Marcello Mastroianni Young Talent Award honored. Films that artfully defy genre conventions are rare and often overlooked. It speaks for the festival and its jury that extremes have been found and rewarded – that’s exactly what cinema needs more than ever. Especially with the over-presence of Netflix, which got nothing when it came to prices.
