JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The Woman Who Left, a black-and-white revenge thriller lasting 228 minutes, has won the Golden Lion at the 73rd Venice film festival.

The 19th film by Filipino director Lav Diaz, 57, it focuses on the struggle of a schoolteacher to reintegrate into society after 30 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit.

“This is for my country, for the Filipino people; for our struggle and the struggle of humanity,” said Diaz, thanking the jury headed by British director Sam Mendes.

In second place, winning the Silver Lion, was Nocturnal Animals, a mordant thriller by Tom Ford which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams in dual roles as a once-married couple and as the protagonists in the novel one of them has written.

It is the fashion director’s second film; his first, A Single Man, also had its first screening at the festival, in 2009, taking best actor for Colin Firth.

The award for best director was tied between young Mexican Amat Escalante (for The Untamed) and veteran Russian Andrei Konchalovsky for his Holocaust drama, Paradise.

Emma Stone took the best actress award for her role as an aspirant star in Damien Chazelle’s musical, La La Land, while Oscar Martinez was named best actor for Argentine-Spanish drama The Distinguished Citizen.

Meanwhile Noah Oppenheimer won best screenplay for his script to Jackie, the study of Jackie Kennedy at the time of the assassination of her husband, John F Kennedy, starring Natalie Portman.

The Bad Batch, a desert-set cannibal thriller with Suki Waterhouse, Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves, won the jury prize for the 36-year-old British born Ana Lily Amirpour.

The awards mark the end of this year’s edition, reckoned by many to be one of the strongest in recent memory. Meanwhile in Canada, an impressive slate of films is also being unveiled at the 41st Toronto film festival, which ends next Sunday.

Read it in The Guardian.

Congratulations to Lav Diaz, a filmmaker who tells the truth.