US documentary wins top prize at Venice Film Festival

A documentary tracing an artist's campaign against the family behind the US opioid drug epidemic scooped the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, on September 10.

Cate Blanchett won her second Venice acting award for her performance as a predatory classical music conductor in "Tar" - having won in 2008 for her unexpected turn as Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There", France 24 reports.

She vowed to "drink a lot of red wine" out of the Volpi Cup she was awarded, and thanked "people around the world who make music which has kept us going in the last couple of years". And Colin Farrell was named best actor for his part in the pitch-black Irish drama "The Banshees of Inisherin", which also won the best screenplay award for writer-director Martin McDonagh.

But the jury, led by Julianne Moore, determined that the best of the 23 films in competition was "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed".

It is the latest documentary from Oscar-winner Laura Poitras, who previously made history as the first contact with whistleblower Edward Snowden when he exposed massive surveillance by the National Security Agency.

Her new film explores the traumatic and brilliant life of photographer Nan Goldin, and her recent campaign to publicly shame the Sackler family who owns the pharmaceutical firm behind the painkiller Oxycontin.

"I've known a lot of brave and courageous people in my life but I've never known anyone like Nan," Poitras said as she picked up the award.

"Someone who could decide to take on the billionaire Sackler family, which is ruthless and responsible for countless deaths and so much bloodshed."

The opioid addiction crisis has caused more than 500,000 overdose deaths in the United States - and Sackler's company has been ordered to pay up to $6 billion in damages.