The Room Next Door wins top Golden Lion prize at Venice Film Festival

The 81st edition of the world’s oldest film festival wrapped up on Saturday night, with international celebrities flocking to Venice’s red carpet.

Among the other award winners was Nicole Kidman who won the best actress award for her role in Babygirl, in which she plays a high-powered CEO putting her career and family on the line to begin an affair with her much younger intern.

Although Kidman was in Venice for the film’s premiere last week, the Australian actress did not attend the awards ceremony after learning her mother had died.

“My heart is broken,” Kidman said in a statement read out onstage on her behalf.

“I’m in shock, and I have to go to my family. But this award is for her. She shaped me, she guided me, and she made me,” she said.

France’s Vincent Lindon received the best actor award for French language film The Quiet Son, about a family torn apart by extreme-right radicalism.

The best director award went to American Brady Corbet for The Brutalist, recounting the tale about a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor played by Adrien Brody, who seeks to rebuild his life in the US.

Queer with Daniel Craig playing a gay drug addict, and the Maria Callas biopic Maria, starring Angelina Jolie as the celebrated Greek soprano did not get any awards.

The festival marks the start of the awards season.