Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco was awarded the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, the second most important award, for his feature film New Order / Nuevo órden at the 77th edition of the Venice Film Festival. The president of the jury, actress Cate Blanchett, announced the award and presented it to the Mexican director.
Starring Diego Bonetta, Naián González Norvind, and Darío Yazbez, the riveting, suspenseful dystopian drama, is set in a lavish upper-class wedding that goes awry in an unexpected uprising of class warfare that gives way to a violent coup d’état. As seen through the eyes of the sympathetic young bride and the servants who work for- and against- her wealthy family, New Order breathlessly traces the collapse of one political system as a more harrowing replacement springs up in its wake.
In his acceptance speech, Franco mentioned that he started working on the screenplay six years ago but didn’t think that the pandemic would bring his dystopia closer to reality. New Order becomes the second Mexican production to win the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize after Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert in 1965, and the fourth Latin American film after the Brazilian film They Don't Wear Black-tie by Leon Hirszman in 1982 and the Argentine film Tangos, the Exile of Gardel by Fernando Solanas in 1985.
