06/09/2014 - VENICE 2014: The competition jury of the 71st Venice Festival, helmed by the famous French musician, comments on the films that won awards

“I hadn't read anything at all about the films in competition, and I don’t think the other jury members had either. I walked into the cinema completely blind, with no preconceptions. We wanted to be amazed, moved and left awe-struck, and that’s just what Andersson’s film did to us.” This is how the chair of the official competition jury at the 71^st Venice Film Festival, musician Alexandre Desplat, explained the Golden Lion awarded to A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence [+see also:
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film profile] by Roy Andersson at the final jury press conference at the Mostra. The Swedish director, for his part, said he was “very happy, deeply moved and honoured to have received this award in Italy, of all places”, adding: “I owe my becoming a director to Italian cinema – at the top of the list of my favourite films is Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica.”

Director/actor Carlo Verdone then took the floor to say a few more words on the subject of Italian films, which garnered a high degree of praise this year: “They were three good films, but we came to focus on the one that had a higher chance of being discussed, the one that moved us a great deal through the actors’ performances – in other words, Hungry Hearts [+see also:
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film profile] by Saverio Costanzo. (The film snagged both the Best Actor and Best Actress Awards.) He added: “We were also bowled over by Mario Martone and Francesco Munzi, but Costanzo’s film touched us to a greater degree; it’s a claustrophobic, complicated film that grows little by little.”

The competition jury members then focused on The Look of Silence [+see also:
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film profile] by Joshua Oppenheimer, which won the Grand Jury Prize: “An extraordinary film; cinema in its purest form,” actor Tim Roth remarked, adding: “This film and Andersson’s are two sides of the same coin – the real and the imaginary, both of which have a very strong impact.”

“The three main awards were given to films in which there is a very blurred line between documentary and fiction,” observed German director Philip Gröning. “Koncalovskij’s film has something of the documentary about it, as does Andersson’s, to a certain extent. Cinema is changing, and the awards reflect this change.”

(Translated from Italian)