Venice Film Festival jury president Bernardo Bertolucci said that he wanted to honor the film that most surprised him, and he couldn’t have surprised us more with the winner of the Golden Lion, the documentary Sacro Gra. Sacro Gra is the first documentary to win and in the first year that documentaries were eligible to win .
The other awards were unusual choices too, with the Silver Lion for Best Director going to Alexandros Avranas for Miss Violence and the Grand Jury Prize to Ming-Liang Tsai’s Stray Dogs.
The movies at this year’s festival that will make far more money than Sacro Gra, like Night Moves or Under The Skin, were ignored, and it might not make sense to some how a little documentary could even compete with those bigger movies with the big stars.
In the end, I think we have to remember that a film festival isn’t the Academy Awards (thank God), and not a competition in the same sense. Film festivals are for exploring, discovering, and surprising ourselves. This year’s jury decided that Sacro Gra was the gem that was most exciting to extract.
My pick would have been different, but I respect their choice and heartily congratulate Gianfranco Rosi for his wonderful look at the people who live down by the highway, Rome’s GRA.
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