By Michael Roddy VENICE (Reuters) – Swedish director Roy Andersson’s offbeat comedy “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence” won the Golden Lion award for best film at the 71st Venice Film Festival on Saturday. Andersson, whose films have won a cult following in Europe, endeared himself to the Italian audience for the awards ceremony in Venice’s Palace of the Cinema by saying he had been inspired by the famous Italian director Vittorio De Sica, and particularly his “Bicycle Thieves” of 1948. “So I will go further and try to work and make as good movies as Vittorio De Sica.” The award for best director went to 77-year-old Andrei Konchalovsky for his film “The Postman’s White Nights”, which is set in a lakeside village in the Russian countryside and follows the lives of local people, sometimes filmed through hidden cameras. American director Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence”, a documentary about confronting the perpetrators of massacres in Indonesia in the 1960s following a failed communist coup, got the Jury Prize for best film.
Source: https://in.news.yahoo.com/offbeat-swedish-film-takes-top-prize-venice-film-181348784.html