Iranian film scoops Venice festival top prize

Model Claudia Schiffer among the guests at this year's festival

VENICE, Italy (Reuters) -- A dark Iranian movie about the oppression of women called "The Cirlcle", has won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival.

The movie, directed by Jafar Panahi, emerged as a clear critics' favourite after its screening earlier this week.

It tells the story of the daily lives of eight women in a country where they are not allowed to smoke in public, stay in a hotel on their own, or ride in a car driven by a man who is not a relative.

"Obviously the film met with a few problems as we were making it," Panahi told a news conference after he accepted the prize.

"It was born after a long labour and I wouldn't want to go through it again. But I'm happy to have given birth to this film."

It starts in a delivery room, where the birth of a daughter is greeted with disappointment by relatives, and ends in prison where the paths of the eight women finally cross.

"I got the idea for the film from a story in a newspaper about a woman who killed her two daughters and then committed suicide," the director said this week.

"There was nothing about the reasons for the crime. Perhaps the newspaper did not see the need...since the freedom of women is so limited it seems as if they are in a big prison."

The film was made with money from Italian and French backers and partly financed by Panahi himself.

U.S. painter and director Julian Schnabel took home the Jury Grand Prix for best director for "Before Night Falls," a movie tracking the life of gay Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas, a victim of Cuban censors.

"This is unbelievable for me, I'm speechless -- and that's very rare for me," Schnabel joked as he accepted the award, wearing a sarong and a sports jacket over an open-necked shirt.

"I'm a painter, so it's an honour for me to share the stage with these great directors."

The film also picked up the Volpi Cup for best male acting performance for Spanish actor Javier Bardem's intense portrayal of Arenas.

The Special Director's Award went to Indian director Buddhadeb Dasgupta for his film "The Wrestlers," a lyrical portrayal of the devastating impact of violence on a small town in rural India.

Australian Rose Byrne won the award for best actress in the Australian film "The Goddess of 1967" by Clara Law. She plays a blind 17-year-old girl who leads a Japanese man on a strange and erotic journey through the Australian countryside in search of the seller of a 1967 Citroen.

French movie "La Faute A Voltaire" ("It's Voltaire's Fault"), by Tunisian-born Abdel Kechiche, won the $100,000 prize for best directorial debut for his tale of a Tunisian illegal immigrant navigating the ins and outs of Paris.

Italy's "The Hundred Steps," a true story about a courageous anti-Mafia crusader in 1960s Sicily, won top prize for best script for a screenplay, written by director Marco Tullio Giordana, Claudio Fava and Monica Zapelli.

Another critics' favourite, Chinese director Jia Zhangke's "Platform," went empty handed. The film is a sensitively related story about rebellious youths growing up in China's provinces in the 1980s as popular culture began to seep into local life.

Some of the most popular films were screened outside the main competition, such as U.S. scriptwriter Kenneth Lonergan's first feature film "You Can Count on Me."

The world's oldest film festival last week honoured U.S. actor and director Clint Eastwood with a Golden Lion for career achievement, and his latest film "Space Cowboys" kicked off the festival on August 30 with a star-studded European premiere.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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