Roundup: Swedish film wins Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival
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E-mail Xinhua, September 7, 2014
A Swedish film won the Golden Lion for Best Film, the highest prize awarded at the 71st Venice film festival which ended here on Saturday.
En duva satt pa en gren och funderade pa tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence) by Swedish director Roy Andersson is the story of two traveling salesmen peddling novelty items.
The salesmen are an unlikely pair who sell grotesque party masks and quarrel continuously, like a modern Don Quixote and Sancho.
Sam, who considers himself the brains of the operation, ceaselessly patronizes his companion. Jonathan is slow and phlegmatic, finding happiness in the simple act of eating.
The pair inspires hilarity through a series of rich and surprising events. They show to the audience beauty in one moment, pettiness in another, as well as the humor and tragedy within humanity and life's grandeur next to human frailty.
"The film has 39 scenes, and my ambition is that each can deliver an artistic experience to the audience," Andersson said.
He said the work was a challenge for viewers to examine their own existence.
"It aims to generate reflection and contemplation, regarding our existence with a large slice of tragicomedy, lust for life, and a fundamental respect for human existence," the director added.
Born in 1943 in Gothenburg, Sweden, Andersson graduated from the Swedish Film School, and his first feature, A Swedish Love Story, won four prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in 1970. In 1975, he started a pioneering career as a commercials director.
En duva satt pa en gren och funderade pa tillvaron, his fifth feature film, is the final chapter in the The Living Trilogy, which has been 15 years in the making.
Twenty titles, of which 19 world premieres and one international premiere, competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, including a new film by Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai, Chuangru zhe (Red Amnesia).
The nine members of the international jury came from miscellaneous backgrounds. The jury president French musician Alexandre Desplat is famous for the soundtracks of important movies, while English designer Sandy Powell for his costumes. Chinese American actress Joan Chen was also in the group.
The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky for his The Postman's White Nights, which focuses on the lives of the inhabitants of a remote Russian village.
American actor Adam Driver, the male protagonist of Hungry Hearts, a film by Italian director Saverio Costanzo that reflects the obsessive fears of the present society, won the Coppa Volpi award for Best Actor.
The Coppa Volpi award for Best Actress was given to the female protagonist of the same film, Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher.
The Grand Jury Prize went to The Look of Silence by American director Joshua Oppenheimer, a documentary filming perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide.
The Orizzonti selection, an international competition dedicated to films that represent the latest aesthetic and expressive trends in international cinema, gave its Award for Best Film to Court by Indian director Chaitanya Tamhane. The film is the tale of an old storyteller indicted of instigation to suicide.
Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar won the Orizzonti Award for Best Director for his Theeb, the story of a young boy who lives with his Bedouin tribe in a forgotten corner of the Ottoman Empire.
A total of 56 films were screened this year in the official selection at the world's oldest film festival, which ran from Aug. 27 to Sept. 6 this year on the Lido seafront in the Italian iconic water city. Endit
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