The only moving moment in the closing ceremony of the 70th Venice Film Festival (28 August-7 September) was when the great cinema artist Bernardo Bertolucci entered on a wheelchair, having lost the ability to walk due to illness. He was greeted with a few minutes' standing ovation. The official competition of the world's most prestigious film event this year was truly historic, with a good half of the 20 films on offer of truly high artistic value. Yet the awards were as disappointing as the programme was remarkable. Indeed, it was almost as if the jury intentionally gave the highest prizes to the lowest-quality films and vice versa; it wouldn't be surprising if these decisions affected the standing of the great festival, with great filmmakers possibly refusing to be part of it until this round is forgotten. The British filmmaker Stephen Frears' Philomena was highly acclaimed by the critics and came first in audience surveys, and it was worthy of the Golden Lion by any standard. It will be in the Oscars next year and may well be the Oscar film, and the jury could not entirely ignore it: it was given the best screenplay prize, which went to its writers Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, the latter also acting opposite Judi Dench as Philomena. Nor was the jury able to ignore the Italian filmmaker Emma Dante's Via Castellana Bandiera, which deserved the jury or the screenplay prize but received the Volpi Cup for the great Italian actress Elena Cotta as best actress. Cotta, who did not utter a single word for the duration of the film, offered a great performance, but it was not superior to that of Judi Dench as Philomena or Mia Wasikowska in the Australian filmmaker John Curran's Tracks. And even the positive value in the Gold Lion going to a feature-length documentary since the festival was founded in 1932 was marred by the fact that it went to the worse of two films: the Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi's Sacro Gra, as opposed to the American filmmaker Errol Morris's The Unknown Known, which was more complete and more important at every level. Of course the critics' views do not have to be identical to the views of a jury, but the contradiction here is that the jury prize in its first round — making the festival prizes eight instead of seven — should go to the Taiwanese filmmaker Ming-Liang Tasi's Stray Dog, which ranked 11th in the critics' surveys and does not deserve any prize. Even more of a problem is the Greek filmmaker Alexandros Avranas's Miss Violence, which received two prizes — the Silver Lion and the best actor award for Themis Panou — for reasons that remain difficult to imagine, even though it ranked 16th in the critics' survey; it received no five stars from any critic, while four critics gave it one star. It is a superficial and pretentious film, and the lead performance in it is lower than average, and can compare with neither Steve Coogan in Philomena nor Antonio Albanese in Gianni Amelio's L'Intripedo. The special jury prize went deservedly to the German filmmaker Philip Gröning's Die Frau Des Polizisten, but the Marcello Mastroianni award for the best new actor or actress went to Tye Sheridan for his role in the American filmmaker David Gordon Green's Joe, whose performance was too weak and bland to justify it; it seems the award went to Sheridan so that America would not come out of the festival with no prizes to its name.
