Actress Emma Stone attends the Opening Ceremony and 'Birdman' premiere during the 71st Venice Film Festival . Photo / Getty
Actress Emma Stone attends the Opening Ceremony and 'Birdman' premiere during the 71st Venice Film Festival . Photo / Getty
No wonder Emma Stone has a spring in her step.
Ten days after she delighted critics on opening night at the Venice Film Festival with her all-singing, all-dancing turn in the musical La La Land, the 27-year-old star of Birdman and The Help was presented with the Volpi Cup for Best Actress by the festival's jury.
Emma Stone attends the opening ceremony and premiere of 'La La Land' during the 73rd Venice Film Festival at Sala Grande. Photo / Getty
Stone is the first American to win the prize since Julianne Moore in 2002 for Far from Heaven: since then, honourees have included two British actresses, Helen Mirren and Imelda Staunton, who won respectively for The Queen and Vera Drake.
Actress Helen Mirren, arrives at the Miramax Premiere Of The Queen; held at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Photo / Getty
The award has nudged Stone into an early lead in the Best Actress race in the coming Oscar season - five months away, but it's never too soon to get excited - where her rivals will likely include Natalie Portman, whose new film Jackie, a biopic of the former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, also had its world premiere at Venice this year.
Portman's well-reviewed performance (some critics have described it as her best to date) means Stone's victory at the may have been a close-run thing - but in the end, Jackie won the festival's award for best screenplay, and there's a long-standing convention at Venice that nofilm should be honoured in more than one category.
Natalie Portman plays Jackie Kennedy in the biopic 'Jackie'
This year's festival jury was presided over by Sam Mendes, the director of American Beauty and Skyfall, and included the actresses Gemma Arterton and Chiara Mastroianni and the documentary film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer.
The Grand Jury Prize was presented to Tom Ford for his luxe noir thriller Nocturnal Animals, which stars Amy Adams as a divorcee whose former husband, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, sends her the manuscript of an unpublished novel laced with references to their relationship.
Tom Ford, Amy Adams and Aaron Taylor-Johnson attend the premiere of 'Nocturnal Animals' during the 73rd Venice Film Festival at Sala Grande. Photo / Getty
The Golden Lion - the festival's highest honour - went to the Filipino auteur Lav Diaz for The Woman Who Left, a near-four-hour black-and-white revenge drama about a schoolteacher acquitted on a murder charge after 30 years in prison. It is the first time Diaz has received a major award from one of the "Big Three" festivals - Cannes, Venice and Berlin - although his previous film, an eight-hour historical drama called A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, won a second-tier honour at Berlin in February this year from a jury led by Meryl Streep.
Unexpectedly, the Silver Lion for best director was split between two films: The Untamed, an unsettling creature feature from Mexico's Amat Escalante about a sexually voracious space octopus who lives in a woodshed on a sheep pasture, and Paradise, an austere Holocaust drama from Russia's Andrei Konchalovsky.
The Special Jury Prize was given to The Bad Batch, a post-apocalyptic survival western directed by Ana Lily Amirpour and starring the English model Suki Waterhouse as a desert wanderer who escapes the clutches of a cannibal tribe.
Director Ana Lily Amirpour and actress Suki Waterhouse attend the premiere of 'The Bad Batch' during the 73rd Venice Film Festival at Sala Grande. Photo / Getty
The Volpi Cup for Best Actor went to Oscar Martinez for playing an urbane novelist who returns to his humble home town in the Argentinian comedy The Distinguished Citizen.
The Marcello Mastroianni award for best newcomer went to the 21-year-old German actress Paula Beer for her work in François Ozon's interwar romance
Frantz,
in which she plays a young German woman whose fiancé has been killed in the trenches and who falls for a mysterious French visitor to her village.
Actress Paula Beer poses with the Premio Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best New Young Actress for 'Frantz' during the award winners photocall during the 73rd Venice Film Festival. Photo / Getty
Venice Film Festival 2016: The full winners list
International Competition:
Golden Lion:The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz) Grand Jury Prize:Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford) Silver Lion for Best Director: Amat Escalante (The Untamed) and Andrei Konchalovsky (Paradise) Best Actor (Volpi Cup): Oscar Martínez (The Distinguished Citizen) Best Actress (Volpi Cup): Emma Stone (La La Land) Best Screenplay Award: Noah Oppenheim (Jackie) Special Jury Prize:The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour) Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor: Paula Beer (Frantz)
Horizons (Orizzonti):
Best Film: Release Me (Federica Di Giacomo) Best Director: Home (Fien Troch) Special Jury Prize:Big Big World (Reha Erdem) Best Actress: Ruth Díaz (The Fury of a Patient Man) Best Actor: Nuno Lopes (Saint George) Best Screenplay: Bitter Money (Wang Bing) Best Short: La Voz Perdida (Marcello Martinessi)
Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Film:The Last of Us (Ala Eddine Slim)
Venezia Classici Awards:
Best Documentary on Cinema:The Graduation (Claire Simon) Best Restored Film:Break Up, the Man with the Balloons (Marco Ferreri)
Special Awards:
Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jerzy Skolimowski Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award: Amir Naderi Persol Tribute to Visionary Talent Award: Liev Schreiber
