Venice Film Festival announces awards winners, including Chinese actor Xin Zhilei and Toni Servillo

The 82nd Venice Film Festival is coming to a close with an awards ceremony on Saturday (September 6, 2025) that has repeatedly turned to the war in Gaza. The prizes include nods for acting, directing and best picture, called the Golden Lion.

The Alexander Payne-led jury named Chinese actor Xin Zhilei best actress for leading Cai Shangjun’s “The Sun Rises on Us All,” a story about a love triangle set in the world of sweatshops in Guangzhou. Italian actor Toni Servillo won best actor for playing a president at the end of his term in Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grazia.”

They also singled out Swiss actor Luna Wedler with the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which goes to a young actor, for her turn in the film “Silent Friend,” a poetic three-part story about a ginkgo tree in a medieval university town in Germany.

Several directors and actors were on the red carpet before the show, including “The Smashing Machine” director Benny Safdie, “Father Mother Sister Brother” filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and the ensemble behind “The Voice of Hind Rajab.”

Winners for the horizons sidebar, a discovery section led by French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, were announced first. “En El Camino,” about the world of long-haul trucking in Mexico from filmmaker David Pablos, won best film. Anuparna Roy was emotional accepting the best director prize for her debut feature, “Songs of Forgotton Trees,” about two migrant women in Mumbai.

Ms. Roy, who is Indian, devoted part of her remarks to the conflict in Gaza. “Every child deserves peace, freedom, liberation, and Palestine is no exception,” Ms. Roy said. “I stand beside Palestine. I might upset my country but it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

Armani Beauty’s audience award winning filmmaker Maryam Touzani (“Calle Málaga”) also used her remarks to spotlight Gaza. “How many mothers have been made childless,” she said. “How many more until this horror is brought to an end? We refuse to lose our humanity.”

“Aftersun” filmmaker Charlotte Wells handed out the debut film prize to Nastia Korkia for “Short Summer,” who spoke about the ongoing war in Ukraine. Her film is a loosely autobiographical account of a child living with her grandparents during the Chechen war.

“I very much hope that we will keep our eyes wide open and that we will find the strength to stop the war,” Ms. Korkia said.

The ceremony also included a tribute to the late Giorgio Armani, who died on Thursday (September 4, 2025), with a standing ovation from the audience. Armani Beauty is a longtime sponsor of the festival.

“Thank you, Giorgio Armani, for teaching us that creativity lives in the spaces where disciplines meet – fashion, cinema, art, new materials, architecture – just as happens every day here at the Venice Biennale,” Italian architect Carlo Ratti said.

This year’s main competition lineup included many possible Oscar heavyweights. Kathryn Bigelow set off a warning shot about nuclear weapons and the apparatus of decision-making with her urgent, and distressingly realistic, thriller “A House of Dynamite.”

Guillermo del Toro unveiled his “Frankenstein,” a sumptuously gothic interpretation of the Mary Shelley classic, with Oscar Isaac portraying Victor Frankenstein as a romantic madman and Jacob Elodri, naive and raw, as the monster.

Park Chan-wook delighted with his darkly comedic “No Other Choice,” a satire about the desperation of white-collar workers competing for jobs.

Dwayne Johnson took a serious turn as a fighter grappling with addiction to painkillers and winner in the MMA/UFC sports drama “The Smashing Machine,” while Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are strange and fierce as kidnapped and kidnapper in Yorgos Lanthimos’s provocative “Bugonia.”

George Clooney and Adam Sandler moved audiences as an aging movie star and his devoted manager on a soul-searching journey through Europe in “Jay Kelly,” a ruthlessly truthful love letter to Hollywood, in all its ridiculousness and beauty.

Jude Law furrowed his brows as Vladimir Putin in “The Wizard of the Kremlin” and Amanda Seyfried put a human, feminist, face to the religious sect the shakers in “The Testament of Ann Lee.”

Julia Roberts also flexed her acting muscles as a Yale philosophy professor in the midst of a misconduct accusation against a colleague in “After the Hunt,” but neither she nor her castmates Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri and director, Luca Guadagnino, are eligible for Venice prizes. The film debuted out of competition.

Far from Hollywood, Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, had a late-festival smash with “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” about the 6-year-old girl killed in Gaza, which reportedly got a 22-minute standing ovation. The film is a shattering document of the Israel-Hamas war, set entirely inside the dispatch center of the Palestine Red Crescent Society rescue service. It uses the real audio of Hind’s call, while actors portray the first responders.

“Nebraska” filmmaker Alexander Payne presided over the main competition jury, which included Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, French director Stéphane Brizé, Italian director Maura Delpero, Chinese actor Zhao Tao and Romanian director Cristian Mungiu.

Both Mr. Lanthimos and Mr. del Toro have won the Golden Lion before, for “Poor Things” and “The Shape of Water,” respectively. Those films also went on to win top Oscars, including best actress for Stone in “Poor Things,” and best picture and director for del Toro’s “The Shape of Water.”

Since 2014, the Venice Film Festival has hosted four best picture winners, including “The Shape of Water,” “Birdman,” “Spotlight” and “Nomadland.” Last year, they had several eventual Oscar-winning films in the lineup, including Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which won three including best actor for Adrien Brody, Walter Salles’ best international feature winner “I’m Still Here,” and the animated short “In the Shadow of the Cypress.”

The previous Golden Lion winner, Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut “The Room Next Door,” a smash at Venice with an 18-minute standing ovation, received no Oscar nominations.