The Venice Film Festival hands out its top awards on Saturday after two weeks of often dark, violent programming including a chilling Israeli-made documentary about Gaza and an oddball drama starring John Malkovich.NAZA, which features Israeli whistleblowers analyzing the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, earned a record 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere on Thursday and is the highest-scored film by international critics, according to film magazine Screen.
But it faces competition from other well-received movies, including poignant relationship study Possible Love by South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong, and dark comedy Wild Horse Nine by British-Irish director Martin McDonagh.
The latter features Malkovich playing a jaded CIA agent taking a break with a colleague on Easter Island in Chile ahead of the 1973 American-backed military coup there in a performance that has seen him tipped by some critics for Oscar glory.
As a director of one of the few films that had audiences laughing in Venice, director McDonagh said his acid sense of humor was his way of coping with the state of the world.
"The only way to deal with it is through humor and to try not to be ground down by it," he told AFP.
