DUBAI: Syrian director Soudade Kaadan nabbed the Armani Beauty Audience Award at the Venice Film Festival for her movie “Nezouh” on Saturday.
“Proud to announce for the second time, my second fiction feature film won in Venice and this time it is the audience @armanibeauty award,” Kaadan wrote on Instagram.
Read our review of ‘Nezouh’ here.
“Nezouh,” which means displacement or migration in Arabic, sees director Soudade Kaadan present an allegorical tale of female emancipation set during the height of the Syrian conflict in Damascus.
A still from the film. (Supplied)
Meanwhile, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras’s epic documentary about photographer Nan Goldin and her activism against the Sackler family and their art connections, was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 79th Venice International Film Festival.
Poitras, the American filmmaker behind the Oscar-winning Edward Snowden documentary “Citizenfour,” thanked the festival for recognizing that “documentary is cinema” at the ceremony Saturday evening in Venice. Neon is expected to release the film in theaters this fall and HBO Documentary Films recently acquired it for a television run.
Considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation, Cate Blanchett won the best actress award in Venice for a second time on Saturday.
Colin Farrell’s best actor award in Venice crowns a redemptive arc for the Irishman, who almost destroyed himself in his dizzying rise to stardom before rebuilding a career as a supporting player.
Farrell’s victory at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday came for his turn as a sweet-natured animal lover in the pitch-black comedy-drama “The Banshees of Inisherin.”