China-born director's Hollywood star shines more after milestone

Nomadland by Chloe Zhao has scooped the top prize at the Venice film festival, making the Chinese-born director the first woman to win the Golden Lion in a decade.

The film, an ode to American wanderlust and the highs and lows of the open road, won the top honor in a competition billed as a relaunch of global cinema bruised by the coronavirus crisis.

Starring Frances McDormand, it is set among a motley tribe of aging van dwellers, down on their luck and roaming the west. The double-Oscar winner plays a widow who takes to the road after losing her home.

Zhao picked up the coveted award 10 years after Sofia Coppola's 2010 win for Somewhere, in a year in which nearly half of the films in the main competition were directed by women.

Via Zoom, Zhao and McDormand appeared from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California - where the film had a US premiere - sitting inside the van used in the movie.

"Thank you so much for letting us come to your festival in this weird, weird world and way," said McDormand. "We will see you down the road," they said in unison, quoting a greeting used by the van dwellers in the film.

Zhao, 38, is one of Hollywood's hottest new talents, with Variety magazine having hailed her last film, The Rider, about a rodeo grunt, as a mini-masterpiece. She is now making the next Marvel movie, The Eternals.

Nomadland was loudly applauded when it premiered in Venice and had horns honking at a Pasadena drive-in cinema for its US premiere.

The Venice festival was the first major international movie competition to go ahead after others around the world, including its main rival, the Cannes Film Festival, were canceled.

The festival's Grand Jury prize was awarded to Nuevo Orden (New Order) by director Michel Franco, an unflinching look at a dystopian Mexico.

Japan's Kiyoshi Kurosawa won a Silver Lion for his wartime espionage thriller Spy No Tsuma (Wife of a Spy).

Britain's Vanessa Kirby, best known for the Netflix series The Crown, won best actress for her performance in Pieces of a Woman by Kornel Mundruczo about a home birth that goes wrong.

The best actor award went to Italian star Pierfrancesco Favino in Padrenostro (Our Father).