French filmmaker Alice Diop won the Grand Jury Prize and the First Film Award for her drama, "Saint Omer", at the 79th Venice Film Festival awards ceremony on Saturday.
The jury, led by US actress Julianne Moore, awarded the Silver Lion to "Saint Omer", a film inspired by a true story.
Directed by French woman Alice Diop, it was also awarded "Best First Film".
"I'm speechless," Diop said, when she received her award on Saturday evening, going on to highlight her feminist struggle, particularly that of "women of colour".
"Silence will not protect us. We will no longer be silent", she promised.
"Nous ne nous tairons plus." - Le puissant discours d'Alice Diop, Lion d'argent (Grand Prix du Jury) avec "Saint Omer".#BiennaleCinema2022 #Venezia79 pic.twitter.com/cCR0JiZ0YE
— CANAL+ (@canalplus) September 10, 2022
Inspired by a true story of a Senegalese migrant on trial for infanticide in France, "Saint-Omer" seeks to explore "the great universal question" of our "relationship to motherhood".
The director until now has specialised in documentaries and won a 2017 César award for her short film "Vers la tendresse" (Towards Tenderness).
For her first feature film, she said she had used "a seemingly sordid news item to question something much broader, which is the relationship that all women and men have with motherhood".
The film's protagonist played by Guslagie Malanda, is a Senegalese immigrant accused of killing her 15-month-old baby by abandoning it on a beach in northern France at high tide.
The film focuses on the real-life trial of Fabienne Kabou who was handed a 20-year sentence by the court in Saint-Omer in 2016 for the murder of her daughter Adélaïde.
Alice Diop attended the trial admitting she had been obsessed with the story from the beginning.
"I was really very upset, flabbergasted. I questioned a lot of quite intimate things about my relationship to motherhood," she explained.
Happy winners
Among the 23 films in competition, "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" about the opioid addiction crisis in the US won the Golden Lion for Best Film.
It is the latest documentary from Oscar-winner Laura Poitras. Her new film explores the traumatic and brilliant life of photographer Nan Goldin, and her recent campaign to publicly shame the Sackler family who own the pharmaceutical firm behind painkiller Oxycontin.
#BiennaleCinema2022 #Venezia79⁰Leone d’Oro per il miglior film / Golden Lion for Best Film:⁰ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED di/by #LauraPoitras pic.twitter.com/rAkvhpHKQi
— La Biennale di Venezia (@la_Biennale) September 10, 2022
Cate Blanchett won her second Venice acting award for her performance as a predatory classical music conductor in "Tar".
Colin Farrell was named best actor for his part in the pitch-black Irish drama "The Banshees of Inisherin".
The Special Jury prize went to "No Bears" by Iran's Jafar Panahi who in July was imprisoned for "propaganda against the system".
