Venice Film Festival Gives Award Named for Jesuit Film Expert

The Venice Film Festival initiated a new juried prize honoring the memory of a Jesuit who taught film studies and founded the Centro Internazionale dello Spettacolo e della Comunicazione Sociale , located in La Spezia, Italy. The first-ever Nazareno Taddei S.J. Prize will be given each year to honor films that combines true human values with high quality cinema language. The late Father Nazareno Taddei, of the Italian Province, was a prominent figure in the field of visual language, greatly appreciated by famous film directors like Federico Fellini.

The inaugural prize was awarded on September 8 to "La Graine et le mullet", made by the French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche. The English title of the movie is "The Secret of the Grain" while the French title literally means 'Grain and Mullet,' the two principal ingredients of a fish couscous. The film tells the story of Slimane, a Tunision who emigrated to France many years earlier and raised a family in his adopted country. Writer-director Kechiche uses a Maghrebi emigre's attempt to open a restaurant as the pretext to explore more profound themes of cultural dialogue and interchange. The film by Abdellatif Kechiche was one of the audience favorites at this year's festival, and also received wide acclaim from international critics, who honored it with the FIPRESCI Prize. The film's lead actress Hafsia Herzi also picked up the Marcello Mastroianni Prize for Most Promising Actress.