The Venezuelan film From Afar won Golden Lion award of 72 nd Venice film festival 2015

The Venezuelan film, Desde Alla, or From Afar has won the top Golden Lion prize at the Venice film festival. A low-profile film from an unknown first-time director  carried away the Venice film festival’s prestigious top prize the Golden Lion. Lorenzo Vigas’s film From Afar (Desde Allá) par excelled the works from such high-profile names as Charlie Kaufman, Tom Hooper,  Laurie Anderson and Alexander Sokurov. This dark drama, about the relationship between a middle-aged gay man and a violent young street tough, was certainly one of the discoveries of the festival.In From Afar - the first Venezuelan film ever to play in competition in Venice was selected by Jury president Alfonso Cuaron, Emmanuel Carrère Pawel Pawlikowski, Lynne Ramsay, Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien and Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Francesco Munzi, Diane Kruger and  Elizabeth Banks. Other award:

Golden Lion: From Afar (Lorenzo Vigas)

Silver Lion for Best Director: Pablo Trapero (The Clan)

Grand Jury Prize: Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson)

Volpi Cup for Best Actor: Fabrice Luchini (L’Hermine)

Volpi Cup for Best Actress: Valeria Golino (Per Amor Vostro)

Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor: Abraham Attah, (Beasts Of No Nation)

Best Screenplay: Christian Vincent (L’Hermine)

Special Jury Prize:

 Frenzy (Emin Alper)Venice Horizons

Best Film: Free In Deed (Jake Mahaffy)

Best Director: Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader)

Special Jury Prize: Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro)

Special Prize for Best Actor: Dominique Leborne (Tempête)

Best Short Film: Belladonna (Dubravka Turic)

Lion of the Future – “Luigi De Laurentiis” Venice Award for a Debut Film: The Childhood of a Leader (Brady Corbet)

Venice Classics

Best Documentary on Cinema: The 1000 Eyes of Dr Maddin (Yves Montmayeur)

Best Restoration: Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini)

"Mad Max: Fury Road" Wins FIPRESCI Grand Prix

George Miller will receive a new award for his latest dystopian film "Mad Max: Fury Road", at the upcoming San Sebastián Film Festival. The Australian filmmaker will collect the FIPRESCI Grand Prix 2015, attributed by film critics from all over the world, during the opening ceremony of the 63rd edition of the Spanish festival, on the 18th of September. "You could have knocked me over with a feather! It's lovely to have this great cohort of critics acknowledge our collective labours in this way," he replied to the announcement.
In an open poll, 493 members of the International Federation of Film Critics, FIPRESCI, first nominated any feature-length work premièred since July 2014, and then chose among four finalists: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "The Assassin" (Nie yin niang), László Nemes's "Son of Saul" (Saul fia), Jafar Panahi's "Taxi" and Miller's "Mad Max: Fury Road".
The latest film in the Mad Max saga, which premiered in Cannes last May, will be screened as a special event during the San Sebastián Film Festival, where the FIPRESCI Grand Prix has been presented since its creation in 1999, to filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jafar Panahi, Pedro Almodóvar, Nuri Bilge Ceylan or Richard Linklater.

 This dystopian film tells us a story in the furthest reaches of our planet, in a stark desert landscape where humanity is broken, and everyone is fighting for the necessities of life, there are two rebels who just might be able to restore order—Max (Tom Hardy), a man of action and few words, who seeks peace of mind following the loss of his wife and child in the aftermath of the chaos, and Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a woman of action who believes her path to survival may be achieved if she can make it across the desert back to her childhood homeland. A typical dystopian film is one which is often, but not always, set in the future, in a society where the government is corrupt and/or ineffectual