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Chinese film triumphs at Venice
2006-09-10
A poetic film about the construction of China's Three Gorges Dam and its effects on villagers facing state-sanctioned flooding, on the Golden Lion for Best Film at the 63rd Venice Film Festival. "Still Life" (Sanxia Haoren) by Jia Zhang-ke, was a last-minute "surprise film" added to the 11-day festival, and left more fancied high-budget movies in its wake. British actress Helen Mirren won the Best Actress award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears' "The Queen," while American star Ben Affleck's role as cinema's first Superman in "Hollywoodland" brought him the Best Actor award. "We all know that China is undergoing enormous change and daily life is experiencing change as a consequence, and I focused my film on this," Zhang-ke told a news conference. "Still Life" recounts the story of people who return to a rural village during the social upheaval caused by the giant Three Gorges project. The 36-year-old director said that following his triumph in Venice, he would continue to make films "which express the problems of the weakest strata of society." "The jury was surprised at the quality of the film that we saw," said jury president Catherine Deneuve, whose fellow judges included filmmakers Bigas Luna, Park Chan-wook, and Cameron Crowe. Deneuve in particular cited "the beauty of the scenography, the quality of the story. We were very touched, we were very surprised, we were very moved. I know that everyone hasn't seen the film yet, but it's a very, very special film." A second film by Zhang-ke, "Dong," a documentary about workers building the dam, featured in the festival's Horizons section. The independent filmmaker's 2000 picture "Platform" and "The World" in 2004 have previously been selected in competition at the Venice festival. Veteran French director Alain Resnais, 84, was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director for "Coeurs," his movie about loneliness and the search for happiness in snow-covered Paris. Unusually, the jury awarded an optional "revelation" Silver Lion to emerging Italian director Emanuele Crialese for "Nuovomondo" (The Golden Door), a movie about a Sicilian family's emigration to the New World in the early 1900s. The Jury Special Prize went to "Daratt" (Dry Season), about the aftermath of Chad's civil war by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, the first African movie to win a prize at a major international festival. "It's a very big surprise and a very beautiful gift," said Haroun. "It means that even if cinema in Africa is low-budget the view that I bring is no less important those expressed by others." In a message to the festival from his home in Los Angeles, Affleck said he was "surprised, flattered and honoured" to receive the acting award for his role as the tragic George Reeves, the first Superman, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1959. Affleck has previously starred in John Madden's Oscar-winning "Shakespeare in Love" and John Woo's "Paycheck". He co-wrote "Good Will Hunting" with fellow actor Matt Damon, winning an Academy Award. Mirren, 60, who was named a Dame of the British Empire by the Queen in 2003, has had a long career on stage and on the screen and received Oscar nominations for Robert Altman's "Gosford Park" and Nicholas Hytner's "The Madness of King George." Mirren said the film's crew had no way of knowing how the Queen would react to the film when it is released in Britain on September 15. "She would probably say...'Well, that could have been worse, could I have another gin and tonic please!'" Peter Morgan won the festival's Osella prize for Best Screenplay for "The Queen." Spike Lee won the Documentary Prize in the festival's Horizons section for his four-hour examination of post-Katrina New Orleans "When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts." Another Chinese director, Liu Jie, took the prize in the Horizons fiction section for cutting-edge new film for "Courthouse on Horseback" (Mabei Shang de Fating), about ethnic minorities in China. French actress Isild le Besco won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress for her role in Benoit Jacquot's "L'intouchable". An Osella for Outstanding Technical Contribution went to Emmanuel Lubezki for his photography on Alfonso Cuaron's apocalyptic vision of a childless world in "Children of Men."
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