FACED with one of the strongest competitions for some time, in which half a dozen films could legitimately lay claim to the Golden Lion prize, Alexandre Desplat and his international jury threw the balls into the air and came up with one that few considered among the best — Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. 

This film is the final part of a loosely connected trilogy about “what it is to be human” which began with Songs from the Second Floor and continued in You, the Living.

It’s a comic drama which tells the story of two distinctly oddball travelling salesmen as they interact with other characters in a kaleidoscopic journey through the humour and tragedy hidden within every human. A rare pleasure and Swedish director Andersson does an extraordinary job.

The Silver Lion Award went to another remarkable film, The Postman’s White Nights by Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky who returned after almost 50 years to the festival. He first swam into the Venice spotlight as a screenwriter on legendary Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood in 1962. 

His latest is set in Kenozero Lake in a small community where everyone knows each other and they produce only those things  necessary for survival. 

The village postman is their sole connection to the outside world and when his boat’s motor is stolen and the woman he loves escapes to the city, the postman follows, desperate for a new adventure and a new life. 

A metaphor sharing the sufferings of the age in which we live, the film’s also a commentary on the material and spiritual foundations of Russia itself. 

Awarded the jury prize, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence is a bold follow up to his Act of Killing. Once again, it focuses on the family of a genocide survivor in Indonesia who confronts the man who killed one of their members. 

Using a more traditional style of documentary storytelling, it makes for another extraordinary, shocking and poetic film. 

Best actress and best actor awards went to Alba Rohrwacher and Adam Driver for their wonderfully nuanced performances in Hungry Hearts, directed by Saverio Costanzo. 

Iranian director Rakshan Bani-Etemad won best screenplay award for Tales, which tackles issues of working-class involvement in drugs and prostitution in Iran but the cherry on top was the Special Jury prize which went to Sivas, the debut film by Turkish director Kaan Mujdeci. 

It’s an unsentimental and hard-hitting look at the relationship which develops between an 11-year-old and a dog named Sivas and all the better for that.

It was symptomatic of a festival where social and political reflections on the world we live in —  or could live in — were present in almost all the films. 

The level of imagination and skill on display were truly impressive.