With this year’s Venice Film Festival drawing to a close, the dishing out of awards has begun.
The Giornate degli Autori jury — headed by Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón — has awarded this year’s GdA Director’s Award and cash prize of 20,000 Euros ($23,000) to Maria Aparicio and Mubi’s Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Rebellion (A veces me entra tristeza, otras veces rebelión). The movie follows Eva Bianco as Eva, a woman passing through Madrid alone when she meets Dante (Roger Koza), an Argentine historian researching labor struggles and the work of Juan Bialet Massé.
“A film that portrays the solitude of the present, holding together an intimate dimension and a political charge, inviting us to think about labor, immigration and privilege through a delicate mise en scène built on small gestures rather than big events,” said the jury, which also included Italian director Sara Fgaier and editor Hania Mroué. “We left the cinema deeply moved, by a sadness and a spirit of rebellion that do not oppose one another, but coexist, as two faces of the same disorientation.”
Elsewhere, the Europa Cinemas Label, instituted by a network of European exhibitors with the support of the EU’s MEDIA program, is dedicated to European films and co-productions. The jury for the prize, composed of Maria Gesuato, Vít Janeček, Aisling Kane, and Daniel Tollefsen Altamirano, has crowned Robert Guediguian’s A Woman Today (Une femme aujourd’hui) the winner. The film follows a young finance professional whose life is turned upside down by a violent assault.
