A modern-day Russian adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet won the best-film award at Rome's first international film festival, as the nine-day movie marathon wrapped up on Saturday.
"Playing the victim" by Kirill Serebrennikov, a family drama centred on a young student who discovers his dead father has been poisoned, was among the 16 films in competition at the event. "This is England", British director Shane Meadows' story of young skinheads in the early 1980s and a hot favourite for the top award, took a special jury prize.
The winners were picked by a 50-member jury made up of ordinary film-goers and supervised by Italian film-maker Ettore Scola. "Neither of these two very beautiful films is commercial but I hope they will reach the big audiences," Scola said at the award ceremony.