Venice winner Poitras combines art and activism in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

THE win at the Venice Film Festival for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed represents a departure for documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has spent much of her career focused on post-9/11 America.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed follows the art and activism of US photographer Nan Goldin – but is still deeply political.

Goldin led efforts to make the billionaire Sackler family – whose company manufactured and marketed addictive pain drug OxyContin – publicly accountable for their role in the opioid crisis, which has killed over 500,000 people through overdoses.

“As a filmmaker who has done political work, I have such respect for what Nan has chosen to do, to use her power and influence in the art world to demand accountability,” Poitras told reporters in Venice last week.

Poitras was the first journalist to connect with Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower.

She shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize with The Guardian and Washington Post for the Snowden leaks, and her resulting film Citizenfour won an Academy Award the following year.

She followed that with 2016‘s Risk about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Other film work has centred on the US occupation of Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, while drone warfare and torture featured in a solo exhibit at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Astro Noise.

Goldin did not attend Saturday’s (Sep 10) awards ceremony as she was preparing a new retrospective.

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But she said at the premiere earlier in the festival that she was particularly proud of bringing down the Sacklers “in a time when billionaires have a different justice system than the rest of us and their total impunity in America”.

Cate Blanchett nabs second Venice best actress award

Considered one of the greatest actresses of her generation, Cate Blanchett won the best actress award in Venice for a second time on Saturday.

Blanchett won in 2007 for her gender-bending performance as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, and also headed the Venice Film Festival jury in 2020.

This time, the 53-year-old won for her complex and challenging role in Tar as a renowned classical music conductor accused of inappropriate liaisons with female colleagues.

The film tackles several hot-button issues including the MeToo movement, political correctness, and women in positions of power.

Colin Farrell: ex-bad boy turned award-winning character actor

Colin Farrell’s best actor award in Venice crowns a redemptive arc for the Irishman, who almost destroyed himself in his dizzying rise to stardom before rebuilding a career as a supporting player.

Farrell’s victory at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday came for his turn as a sweet-natured animal lover in the pitch-black comedy-drama The Banshees of Inisherin.

It reunites him with co-star Brendan Gleeson and writer-director Martin McDonagh, who was awarded with best screenplay, following their much-loved gangster comedy In Bruges from 2008.

Accepting the award by video call from Los Angeles, Farrell thanked “my dance partner”, Gleeson, and held up a bunch of bananas in lieu of the trophy.

“This film is about all the things we struggle with every day: our desire to be loved... our need for friendship,” he told the audience. AFP