Venezuelan movie From Afar wins at Venice festival

VENICE, Italy — Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’ powerful Caracas-set drama From Afar won the Venice Film Festival’s top Golden Lion prize, 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 truecrime thriller that has broken box-office records in its homeland, took the Silver Lion for best direction at the awards handed out during the weekend.

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.

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.