Venice, Golden Lion to Pedro Almodovar's La Stanza accanto

At this point, we would have liked to write that the women's Volpi Cup went to Fernanda Torres for Ainda Estou aqui by Walter Salles, awarded only for the screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega on which the director of Central do brasil has turned a story of dictatorship in his country, from the memoir of the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. The film's protagonist is initially him, Marcelo, a former centre-left deputy, but above all his kidnapping by the army. Then enters the scene his wife Eunice, Fernanda Torres, who pursues the truth about her husband's murder, obtaining his death certificate more than 20 years after the crime, with a determination and strength to bow down to. Despite the statuesque Torres, the best female performance went to Nicole Kidman for Babygirl by Halina Reijn.

Here, too, the reading of the prize is political. A female director who changes the imagery of eroticism and power: no longer a mature man with a young woman, but, on the contrary, a top manager who indulges in the risk and fantasy of a thrusting sexuality with an intern. Kidman was unfortunately not in the auditorium due to mourning the death of her mother. Although the theme addressed by Delphine and Muriel Coulin's Jouer avec le feu is an important one, Huppert must have weighed in as president to have Vincent Lindon awarded the male Volpi. We are in a proletarian, provincial France, where the always excellent Lindon is the 50-year-old railwayman Pierre. A widower, he finds himself single-handedly raising his two sons, Louis (Stefan Crepon) and Fus (Benjamin Voisin), passing on ideals of a convinced leftist. While Louis moves to Paris to study at university, Fus, a metalworker, loses himself in his fascination with the extreme right. The film is a political and sociological examination of the rise of right-wing extremism that finds confirmation in the recent elections in Germany and in the division that corrodes France even after Macron's appointment of Barnier, infuriating Mélenchon. It adds the psychological vein of incommunicability between a father and son in ideological betrayal.

It's a pity about Daniel Craig as Lee, the protagonist of William S. Burroughs' partly autobiographical novel Queer, even though the film followed too many leads and ended up tangling itself in a mishmash of genres, from Indiana Jones to Hollywood classics. However, the first part about Lee's falling in love with a wild, self-centred young man (Drew Starkey), thanks to which Craig comes out of the macho parts, is beautiful. The dangerous and ongoing questioning of the right to abortion, where it has not already been made illegal, is the only reason to give the Special Jury Prize to April by Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili, the story of gynaecologist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), who is being investigated after the death of a baby during childbirth for her work as a mammy. The drama opens the door to pictures of squalor and social deprivation, a consequence of the removal of basic rights. The fierce style is not always empathetic towards female punishment.

France again, finally, in the palmares with Leurs enfants après eux by twins Ludovic and Zoran Boukherma. Having grown up in the free film school founded by Luc Besson, they set their film in 1992, their year of birth. But perhaps the award was inevitable, because it was the only film that could identify a clear emerging actor with Mastroianni. It is Paul Kircher for the role of Anthony, who in the hot provincial summer experiences his first love and rivalry, against the neighbourhood rebel, Hacine (Sayyid El Alami), a figure who is execrable to his family. As for the future, Brady Corbet said it best: 'For all children who deserve a world without borders and without passports'.