The Philippine film The Woman Who Left, a revenge tale shot in black-and-white by director Lav Diaz, won the top Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday.
“I want to dedicate this film to the Filippino people and their struggle, and humanity’s struggle,” Diaz said as he received his prize.
Best actor went to Argentina’s Oscar Martinez for his portrayal of a cynical Nobel Prize-winning author who returns to his village for the first time in 40 years in the comedy on art and fame, The Distinguished Citizen.
Photo: AP
US actress Emma Stone received the best actress prize for her depiction of a struggling thespian who falls head over heels in love with a jazz pianist — played by Ryan Gosling — in the US musical La La Land.
“I wish I could be there to make sure it’s not an elaborate prank,” quipped Stone in a video message, saying she could “think of no better place in the world than Venice to premier La La Land, we had a wonderful time.”
Fashionista-turned-director Tom Ford was awarded the Silver Lion grand jury prize for Nocturnal Animals, a romantic thriller about former lovers starring Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal, with a violent revenge tale told as a story within a story.
The Silver Lion for best director was divided between Mexico’s Amat Escalante for The Untamed, about the sex life of an extraterrestrial, tentacled creature, and Russia’s Andrei Konchalovsky for Holocaust drama Paradise.
Jackie, a bio-drama which stars Natalie Portman as the grief-stricken widow of former US president John F. Kennedy, took best screenplay, with Chilean director Pablo Larrain saying the triumph was all Portman’s, “the only woman who could have played this role.”
The special jury prize went to Ana Lily Amirpour’s cannibal-survivor fairytale The Bad Batch.
Additional reporting by Reuters
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
RSS