The Venice Film Festival’s prize haul Saturday sharpened the early contours of this year’s Oscar season, with wins for John Malkovich, South Korean director Lee Chang-dong and the Gaza documentary “NAZA” all carrying weight beyond the festival itself.
Malkovich took the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his role as a disillusioned CIA agent in Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “Wild Horse Nine,” a performance set on Easter Island ahead of the 1973 coup in Chile. The win puts him in company with recent Venice acting honorees who went on to Oscar nominations, including Willem Dafoe for “At Eternity’s Gate” and Colin Farrell for McDonagh’s earlier “The Banshees of Inisherin.” The result also offers a boost to distributor Searchlight Pictures, which came away from last year’s fall festival circuit without a single nomination despite backing multiple awards contenders.
Lee’s “Possible Love,” his first film in eight years following the acclaimed “Burning,” took the Silver Lion grand jury prize and enters the season as a serious Best International Feature contender with distribution already secured through Netflix.
The steepest questions surround “NAZA,” the documentary from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor built on testimony from Israeli military insiders describing the killing of civilians in Gaza. The film won the festival’s special jury prize after drawing a 25-minute standing ovation, one of the longest in recent memory, and was rated the highest-scoring film of the festival by critics polled by Screen International. Its awards path draws direct comparison to “No Other Land,” the self-distributed documentary on similar subject matter that won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature without a traditional distributor behind it.
“NAZA” currently has no U.S. distribution deal, but industry observers argue that gap did not stop its predecessor from reaching the Academy, and that the film’s subject matter may resonate with voters looking to make a statement through their ballots even as the underlying conflict remains a sensitive subject within the Academy’s membership.
Other prizewinners, including “DAU,” “A Good Little Soldier,” and “A Place to Heal,” remain without U.S. distribution deals, leaving their Oscar prospects less defined heading into the fall festival stretch, which continues with Telluride and moves toward Toronto’s own award-season signals in the coming weeks.
