Lorenzo Vigas’ ‘From Afar’ wins Golden Lion for best picture at Venice Film Festival

VENICE, Italy – Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’ powerful Caracas-set drama “From Afar” won the Venice Film Festival’s top Golden Lion prize on Saturday, as filmmakers from the Americas beat established European directors for the main trophies.

The runner-up Grand Jury Prize went to an American film, Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s inventive, animated “Anomalisa.” And Pablo Trapero’s “El Clan” (“The Clan”), an Argentine true-crime thriller that has broken box-office records in its homeland, took the Silver Lion for best direction.

“From Afar” — “Desde Alla” in Spanish — is Vigas’ first fiction feature, and charts the unexpected relationship between a middle-aged, middle-class man and a violent street youth. Quietly but powerfully, the film maps the currents of sex, money and violence beneath the surface of Venezuelan society.

Vigas dedicated his prize to his country, which is experiencing political and economic turbulence.

“We are having some problems, but we are very positive,” he said. “We are an amazing nation.”

The director said movies could help Latin America “learn from the mistakes of the past.”

A jury led by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron chose winners from among 21 movies competing at the 72nd annual festival — an edition where war, crime and other woes of the world dominated onscreen.

Audiences saw African child soldiers drafted into a brutal civil war in Cary Fukunaga’s “Beasts of No Nation;” Afghan civilians caught between the Taliban and Danish troops in Tobias Lindholm’s “A War;” and Turkish brothers trapped in escalating political violence in Emin Alper’s “Frenzy.”

Alper’s film won a special jury prize at the festival.

Director Jonathan Demme, jury president for the festival’s Horizons competition for emerging talents, said many of the films gave “horrifying glimpses of how hard it is to stay alive in the world today.”

The top Horizons prize went to U.S. director Jake Mahaffy’s drama about a faith healing gone wrong, “Free In Deed.”

Several hotly tipped European contenders were overlooked for prizes, including Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio’s lush vampire fable “Blood of My Blood” and Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov’s art-history meditation “Francofonia.”

Cuaron said he was “very happy” that a Latin American movie had won the Golden Lion for the first time. But he said it was a coincidence that it had happened when a Mexican headed the jury.

Italy’s Valeria Golino took the best-actress trophy for playing a put-upon Neapolitan woman in Giuseppe Gaudino’s experimental family drama “For Your Love.” She won the same prize in 1986 for “A Tale of Love.”

France’s Fabrice Luchini was named best actor for his role as a judge trying to rekindle romance while presiding over a murder trial in Christian Vincent’s “L’Hermine” (“Courted”).

The jury also gave a prize for the best young actor to Abraham Attah, the 14-year-old Ghanaian star of “Beasts of No Nation.”

Brady Corbet, a 27-year-old American actor-director, won the first-feature prize for “The Childhood of a Leader,” an ambitious exploration of the roots of dictatorship that features “Twilight Saga” star Robert Pattinson.

An emotional Corbet offered the advice: “Be patient, be radical, be free.”

The world’s oldest film festival wrapped up Saturday after 11 days that brought stars including Jake Gyllenhaal, Kristen Stewart, Tilda Swinton and Johnny Depp to the canal-crossed Italian city for water-borne photo ops and red carpet premieres.

It also identified some early potential Oscar contenders, including Depp for his performance as gangster Whitey Bulger in “Black Mass,” and Eddie Redmayne as a transgender artist in “The Danish Girl.”