US film Nomadland has won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival, the first such event held with live audiences since the Covid-19 outbreak.
About half of the seats at the venues on the Lido waterfront were left empty, and few celebrities made the trip to the world's oldest film festival.
Australian actress Cate Blanchett, who headed the jury at the 77th edition of the festival, said the winner had been chosen after "healthy and robust" deliberations by the jury members.
"Thank you so much for letting us come to your festival in this weird, weird, weird world and way," McDormand said
The festival's Grand Jury prize went to Franco's film, while Kurosawa was named the best director
Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky was given the Special Jury prize for Dear Comrades!, a film about the massacre of protesters in the USSR in 1962
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