VENICE: Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” a dark fairy tale in which a mute cleaning lady falls in love with an aquatic creature, won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday.
The film beat contenders including George Clooney’s “Suburbicon” and Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing” at the end of a 10-day, high-quality and star-studded movie marathon that critics said showed Venice was now on an equal footing with the widely revered Cannes film festival.
“As a Mexican, I want to say this is a first for a Mexican storyteller so I want to dedicate and give the prize to every young Mexican film-maker or Latin American film-maker that is dreaming to do something in the fantastic genre, as a fairytale, as a parable, and is faced with a lot of people saying it can’t be done. It can,” del Toro said.
The runner-up Grand Jury prize went to family tragedy “Foxtrot” by Israel’s Samuel Maoz, while France’s Xavier Legrand was picked as best director for his divorce drama “Jusqu’a la Garde” (Custody).
Charlotte Rampling received the best actress award for her performance in Italian film “Hannah,” while Palestinian Kamel El Basha took the best actor prize for his role in “The Insult.”
The award ceremony brings down the curtain on the Venice festival, the world’s oldest, which is seen as a launching pad for the industry’s award season.
Movie-makers will be hoping for a replay of the success of films such as musical “La La Land,” clergy sex-abuse drama “Spotlight,” space movie “Gravity” and backstage comedy “Birdman,” which all won Academy Awards after premiering in Venice.
“This is an incredible day for Mexican film, for Mexican storytellers. The three amigos have now conquered the Lido, with Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity) and Alejandro Inarritu (Birdman) both going on to Oscar gold after dominating Venice,” said Ariston Anderson, a film critic at Hollywood Reporter.
“While there’s no sure bet at this stage, there couldn’t be a better start for del Toro’s road to Oscar gold. And it will be very interesting to see what happens in March at the Academy Awards if he can continue the trend of Venice picking Oscar winners,” she said.
The big disappointment of the night was “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” starring Frances McDormand, which only won the award for best screenplay.
The film, a portrayal of vengeance in small-town America, was acclaimed by critics in Venice as a prime Oscar contender.
For all the quality of the Venice film fest, this year on its 74th edition, critics said there was no clear outstanding movie.
“My thoughts after having viewed the lineup are the same, a lot of strong Oscar contenders but no clear-cut winner, unfortunately, as we had in previous years at the festival,” Anderson said.
Still, she said Venice — which not too long ago was seen as being doomed in the face of strong competition from Cannes and Toronto — had once again shown its appeal.
“Because of recent successes, we’re seeing more big studio films shift over to Venice for their international launches, so it will be interesting to see if this trend will continue over the next few years.”
Del Toro’s fairy tale wins top prize at Venice Film Festival
Del Toro’s fairy tale wins top prize at Venice Film Festival
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
