Double Win At Venice Film Festival
“The Hand of God” celebrated a double win at the 78th Venice Film Festival. The feature film by Academy Award winner Paolo Sorrentino was honored with a Silver Lion, while Filippo Scotti received the award for Best Young Actor. “The Hand of God,” produced by Lorenzo Mieli, premiered in competition at the film festival last Friday.
“The Hand of God,” the latest movie by Academy Award-winning writer and director Paolo Sorrentino has won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize Award at the 78th Venice Film Festival. The feature film was produced by Fremantle’s Italian subsidiary The Apartment; Lorenzo Mieli is the producer. It was a double win for “The Hand of God,” with Filippo Scotti also winning the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor. “The Hand of God” premiered in competition at Venice Film Festival last Friday, Sep 3, receiving rave reviews, and will be released in cinemas and on Netflix later this year.
In “The Hand of God,” Oscar-winning writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (“Il Divo,” “The Great Beauty,” “The Young Pope”) tells the coming-of-age story of young Fabietto in 1980s Naples, full of unexpected joys and equal tragedy. Fabietto is a big fan of the SSC Naples soccer club, which has just signed the world-class Argentine player Diego Maradona. But the teenager is also confronted with an unexpected tragedy during this time. For his ninth big-screen movie, Sorrentino returns to his hometown to tell his most personal story, a tale of fate and family, sports and cinema, love and loss. The director himself is a great admirer of Diego Maradona, who he says saved his life in 1986. Because instead of joining his parents at the family’s summer home, the then 16-year-old traveled to an away game of SSC Napoli to see Maradona play. Both parents died in an accident during that vacation. For this reason, Sorrentino describes “The Hand of God” as his “most intimate and personal film” to date.
Fremantle’s Group Chief Operating Officer Andrea Scrosati commented: “We are incredibly proud of Paolo Sorrentino, Lorenzo Mieli and all of the creative team at The Apartment who worked on “The Hand of God”. This is a uniquely powerful and personal film with universal themes, it is cinema at its best. A huge congratulations to everyone involved in the film both on and off screen and to our partners at Netflix. This award adds to the previous successes born from the creative relationship between The Apartment CEO Lorenzo Mieli and Paolo Sorrentino. It began in 2016 with Sorrentino-created and -directed TV series, “The Young Pope,” a Golden Globe nominee for Best Actor and Emmy nominee for Outstanding Production Design and Outstanding Cinematography. This was followed in 2019 by the critically acclaimed second series “The New Pope,” starring Jude Law and John Malkovich.
