‘Before The War’, ‘Our Share Of Sand’ Scoop Top Venice Critics’ Week Prizes

Italian-French director Tommaso Usberti’s Before the War, a coming-of-age tale exploring contemporary masculinity, has scooped the Grand Prize at the 41st Venice International Film Critics’ Week.

In other key feature film prizes, Chilean-Indian London-based director Shalini Adnani’s , a family drama reflecting on inequality and environmental crisis, won the Audience Award.

Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas’s The End Of Times – a radical essay film using archive footage and AI to reflect on memory and colonialism – won the Best Technical Contribution as well as Special Mention within the Grand Prize category.

Set in the northern Italy’s Po Valley, Before the War revolves around a young man raised in a violent, racist and macho milieu, and his encounter with Sonia, a young Kosovar immigrant.

The international jury – composed of French director Chloé Barreau, Hungarian producer Júlia Berkes and writer, cultural curator and film-industry professional Caterina Mazzucato – praised the film for its intense direction, the performance of the lead actor and its mise-en-scène.

“A film that relies as much on silence as on words, where sound and music become a battlefield in their own right to explore urgently contemporary themes: toxic masculinity, impossible desire and the individual’s profound loneliness. A raw, evocative and deeply cinematic feature, both classic and innovative, revealing a strong and distinctive directorial voice,” read their jury statement.  .

The film also won the Luciano Sovena Award for Best Producer “for managing, with limited means, to portray an Italy of those on the margins, between realism and magic, violence and tenderness, romanticism and racism. A dialogue between registers that is also reflected in the winning production (or rather co-production), which best embodies the spirit and mission of Luciano Sovena, to whose memory this award is dedicated”.

It is produced by Thibault de Gantes and Lucas Le Postec at L’Heure d’été; Francesco Virga, Adele Dell’Erario, Marco Serrecchia at MIR Cinematografica and Beatrice Bordone Bulgari at Eolo Film Productions.

The Venice International Film Critics’ Week is an independent and parallel section organised by the Italian National Film Critics Union (SNCCI).

The selection was curated by General Delegate Beatrice Fiorentino together with the selection committee composed of Matteo Berardini, Marianna Cappi, Francesco Grieco and Marco Romagna.