Venice Film Festival: the awards ceremony – Culture

When the festival ended on Saturday night, Venice’s biggest winner was already gone. Julianne Moore, the President of the Jury, presented the Golden Lion for Best Picture to Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker and director of “All The Beauty and the Bloodshed”. But in the moment of triumph, Poitras was what she is in her film – a faithful and withdrawn chronicler of the life and work, the crises and rebellions, the anger and activism of artist Nan Goldin. “This is for Nan,” she called out on stage.

This grand prize in Venice is another amazing turn in Nan Goldin’s life since she managed to break a three-year, life-threatening opioid addiction in 2017. Addiction, as she shows in “All The Beauty and the Bloodshed”, is the theme of her life: for her parents’ lack of love, which she also blames for her sister’s suicide; for exciting but also violent men (“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, 1986); after heroin in the New York drug scene, which she documented with her now very famous photos.

But the painkiller Oxycontin, manufactured by Purdue Pharma since 1995, available on prescription and marketed with great effort, was the worst addictive drug she has ever encountered – and is now blamed for an estimated 400,000 drug-related deaths in the USA alone. A monumental system failure in medicine, an example of unscrupulous lobbying to circumvent any medical duty of care, which can only be called criminal – even if it was and is legal. According to the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, so has it forbesmagazine made a fortune of $13 billion.

Goldin is now fighting against this family with the activist group PAIN, which she foundedand Laura Poitras – who won the Oscar with “Citizenfour”, her film about Edward Snowden – was there with the camera from the beginning. The Golden Lion is now the latest success of the campaign: Due to the term “blood money” coined by Goldin, the name Sackler, once represented by donations and endowments in many important art museums around the world, has now been erased everywhere. Most of the profits are still family-owned, even after Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy. The film makes it clear that Goldin’s struggle continues.

Why would a mother want to kill her child? This is what the drama “Saint Omer” tells about

Why is she such a good fighter? Possibly because she is fearlessly determined to delve further into her own traumas, as seen on “All The Beauty and the Bloodshed.” To the point of discovering that her emotionally troubled mother herself was once abused. She connects this kind of reappraisal with “Saint Omer”, the film that won the Silver Bear. It also stands for the jury’s inclination towards the documentary. Although the French-Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop shot her first feature film here, she comes from documentary film and this time, too, stays very close to reality.

It’s about a child murder trial from 2013 in France, which was negotiated in the city of Saint Omer – Diop was a trial observer at the time. Like her, the defendant is from Senegal, a highly intelligent philosophy student from a well-to-do family whose life in Paris is falling apart – until she decides to leave her one-year-old daughter on a beach in northern France at night to be swept away by the tide and drowned. That’s what happens, and the French legal system is now struggling to understand this mysterious act, just like Diop herself. Her alter ego in the film is pregnant at the moment, but it doesn’t help, it remains a mystery that nobody can solve. This is exactly what makes the strength of “Saint Omer”, which was also awarded as the best first film.

The inexplicable misfortune fits into a pessimistic trait that seems to connect the majority of the award winners. Luca Guadagnino won best director for his tragic teen cannibal drama Bones and All, and he was certainly the Italian in the competition whose gaze is least turned inward – at an Italian film tradition that has become increasingly feeble and appears outdated. In contrast, Guadagnino, who can connect many worlds, presents himself as the better American here.

The story is in the tradition of the drifter drama, a road movie through the American Midwest in search of home and family, only with the addition of an incurable lust for human flesh. “Bones and All” attempts to be a commercial film while still acknowledging that a young cannibal couple can’t very well drive off to a happy ending. A celebration of the outsider that might even be reminiscent of the early work of Nan Goldin – black actress Taylor Russell also won the Young Actor Award. However, one basic problem remains: the innate lust for human flesh is a rather willful construct.

The story of star conductor Lydia in Todd Field’s music drama “Tár” also ends tragically, for which Cate Blanchett won the Coppa Volpi for best actress. For two-thirds of the film, as the maestra of the Berlin Philharmonic, she has to radiate radiant competence and deep artistic integrity – and who would you believe in that more than her? The fact that there is also fundamental self-satisfaction, even self-righteousness, is brushed aside for a long time: shouldn’t female artist stars radiate this just as much as male ones? And yet everything will collapse then, and that’s also part of this performance from the start.

Open detailed view

Colin Farrell, the winner among the male actors, on the other hand, creates a somewhat limited, but fundamentally good-natured character, who at first you don’t think is capable of a bad ending. The farmer Pádraic in “The Banshees of Inisherin” has to deal with the fact that his best friend no longer wants to talk to him and is surprisingly and bloodily serious about it. A true non-event off the Irish coast, circa 1923, that crushes poor Pádraic in his senselessness – until his darkest side is revealed. In fact, Farrell has never been seen better. Its director and writer Martin McDonagh received the screenplay award for the art of escalating this senselessness in a completely compelling manner.

In view of the general tendency towards the tragic, which the competition program as a whole reflects, the Golden Lion seems to Nan Goldin like a gasp, a counter-program. Because yes – it is absolutely right to give Jafar Panahi another special prize from the jury for his film-within-a-film tragedy “Khers nist / No Bears”, although he has already won almost all the important prizes. It pays tribute to his film, which was shot in secret and smuggled out of the police state of Iran, encourages him to return to his prison cell in Tehran, helps him and supports his struggle for life in Iran for the freedom of art. Laura Poitras also called for his release on stage.

Above all, however, one hopes that such campaigns against the forces of darkness will sometimes have an effect. That seemingly invincible opponents lose their supporters and their peace of mind, that a sense of justice brings them to their knees. Nan Goldin shows how it’s done. And so the Golden Lion is above all a thunderous “Keep it up!”. Will this force of nature in the art world rest before the Sacklers have to give up every penny of their filthy profits? Don’t bet on it.