VENICE, Italy — “Father Mother Sister Brother,” Jim Jarmusch’s quietly humorous relationship triptych, won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival Saturday. The film about the relationships between adult siblings, and with their parents, stars Adam Driver, Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett.

It was an upset win over some of the festival’s bigger hits, including “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” which won the runner-up award, and Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” which left empty-handed.

“All of us here who make films are not motivated by competition,” Jarmusch said. “But I truly appreciate this unexpected honor.”

He thanked the festival for “appreciating our quiet film.” He said he related to Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa who once said, while accepting an honor from the Academy Awards at an advanced age, that he was worried he still didn’t know what he was doing.

“I’m learning each time,” Jarmusch said.

Kaouther Ben Hania’s devastating Gaza docudrama “The Voice of Hind Rajab” won the Silver Lion, the runner-up prize. The film is about attempt to rescue a 6-year-old girl from a bullet ridden call in Gaza City in January 2024 and uses the real audio from her call to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

The film premiered later in the festival, but its impact was not dulled. It received a 22-minute standing ovation after its premiere. She dedicated her award to the Red Crescent and “to all those who have risked everything to save lives in Gaza. They are the real heroes.”

Ben Hania in her remarks also called for an end to “this unbearable situation” in Gaza.

“Enough is enough,” she said.

She added: “The voice of Hind is the voice of Gaza itself. Her voice will continue to echo until accountability is real, until justice is served.”

Venice’s acting, directing and other winners

The Alexander Payne-led jury named Chinese actor Xin Zhilei best actress for leading Cai Shangjun’s “The Sun Rises on Us All,” a story about a love triangle set in the world of sweatshops in Guangzhou. Italian actor Toni Servillo won best actor for playing a president at the end of his term in Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grazia.”

Benny Safdie took the best director prize for his Mark Kerr MMA biopic “The Smashing Machine,” which has kicked off Oscar buzz for its star, Dwayne Johnson.

“I never thought I’d be up here,” Safdie said. “To be here amongst the giants of the past and the giants here this year, it just blows my mind.”

He also thanked his subject, Kerr, and his stars Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson.

“You truly performed with no net, and we jumped off a cliff together,” Safdie said of Johnson.

Valérie Donzelli and Gilles Marchand were recognized with best screenplay for their gig economy drama “At Work,” a French film about a successful photographer who gives up everything to focus on writing, and ends up in poverty.

The special jury prize went to Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi for his lyrical Naples documentary “Below the Clouds.”

They also singled out Swiss actor Luna Wedler with the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which goes to a young actor, for her turn in the film “Silent Friend,” a poetic three-part story about a ginkgo tree in a medieval university town in Germany.

“Nebraska” filmmaker Payne presided over the main competition jury, which included Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, French director Stéphane Brizé, Italian director Maura Delpero, Chinese actor Zhao Tao and Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. The international group selected a particularly diverse batch of winners.

Winners spotlight wars in Gaza and Ukraine

Winners for the horizons sidebar, a discovery section led by French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, were announced first. “En El Camino,” about the world of long-haul trucking in Mexico from filmmaker David Pablos, won best film. Anuparna Roy was emotional accepting the best director prize for her debut feature, “Songs of Forgotton Trees,” about two migrant women in Mumbai.

Roy, who is Indian, devoted part of her remarks to the conflict in Gaza.

“Every child deserves peace, freedom, liberation, and Palestine is no exception,” Roy said. “I stand beside Palestine. I might upset my country but it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

Armani Beauty’s audience award winning filmmaker Maryam Touzani (“Calle Málaga”) also used her remarks to spotlight Gaza.

“How many mothers have been made childless,” she said. “How many more until this horror is brought to an end? We refuse to lose our humanity.”

“Aftersun” filmmaker Charlotte Wells handed out the debut film prize to Nastia Korkia for “Short Summer,” who spoke about the ongoing war in Ukraine. Her film is a loosely autobiographical account of a child living with her grandparents during the Chechen war.

“I very much hope that we will keep our eyes wide-open and that we will find the strength to stop the war,” Korkia said.

Honoring Armani

The ceremony also included a tribute to the late Giorgio Armani, who died Thursday, with a standing ovation from the audience. Armani Beauty is a longtime sponsor of the festival.

“Thank you, Giorgio Armani, for teaching us that creativity lives in the spaces where disciplines meet – fashion, cinema, art, new materials, architecture – just as happens every day here at the Venice Biennale,” Italian architect Carlo Ratti said.

Oscars impact

This year’s main competition lineup included many possible Oscar heavyweights, though most of Hollywood’s flashiest offerings came up short at the awards. Kathryn Bigelow set off a warning shot about nuclear weapons and the apparatus of decision-making with her urgent, and distressingly realistic, thriller “A House of Dynamite.”

Guillermo del Toro unveiled his “Frankenstein,” a sumptuously gothic interpretation of the Mary Shelley classic, with Oscar Isaac portraying Victor Frankenstein as a romantic madman and Jacob Elodri, naive and raw, as the monster. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons were strange and fierce as kidnapped and kidnapper in Yorgos Lanthimos’s provocative “Bugonia.” While they didn’t prevail at the festival’s awards, the films could still go on to be in the broader awards conversation.

Since 2014, the Venice Film Festival has hosted four best picture winners, including “The Shape of Water,” “Birdman,” “Spotlight” and “Nomadland.” Last year, they had several eventual Oscar-winning films in the lineup, including Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which won three including best actor for Adrien Brody, Walter Salles’ best international feature winner “I’m Still Here,” and the animated short “In the Shadow of the Cypress.”

The previous Golden Lion winner, Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut “The Room Next Door,” a smash at Venice with an 18-minute standing ovation, received no Oscar nominations.

The ACLU and United Farm Workers have filed a motion alleging that the Border Patrol violated a court order intended to curb racial profiling and unlawful, warrantless arrests in the Central Valley.

They want the judge to require new training and forbid agents involved in a July raid in Sacramento from participating in other operations until they are retrained.

In April, a federal district court judge ruled that the Border Patrol likely violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure during a January operation in Kern County called “Operation Return to Sender,” in which agents swarmed a Home Depot and Latino market, among other areas frequented by laborers. The judge ordered the Border Patrol, led by El Centro Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, to stop the raids in California’s Eastern District, which covers much of the state’s Central Valley, including Sacramento.

Bovino in June took his agents to Los Angeles, where they spent weeks aggressively pursuing Latino-looking workers outside of Home Depots, car washes, bus stops and other areas. The agents often wore masks and used unmarked vehicles.

After a federal district court judge temporarily barred agents from conducting raids in the Los Angeles area, Bovino briefly moved north to Sacramento in July, detaining Latino day laborers in a Home Depot parking lot.

In an interview near the parking lot with Fox News, Bovino indicated at the time that his operations were ramping up, not slowing down. “There is no sanctuary anywhere,” Bovino said.

“We’re here to stay. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to affect this mission and secure the homeland.”

Bovino told Fox the raids were targeted and based on intel.

“Everything we do is targeted,” he said. “We did have prior intelligence that there were targets that we were interested in and around that Home Depot, as well as other targeted enforcement packages in and around the Sacramento area.”

In a motion filed last week, the ACLU and the United Farm Workers asked the federal district court to enforce the preliminary injunction issued in April that barred Border Patrol agents from stopping people without reasonable suspicion and from making warrantless arrests without assessing flight risk.

If granted, the motion could potentially bar Bovino from planning or participating in new raids in the Eastern District. Bovino appears to be moving on regardless: He announced Tuesday on his social media account that the L.A. crackdown would be expanding to other cities across the country.

A Border Patrol spokesman did not return a request for comment about the ACLU and UFW’s motion.

If the plaintiffs in the Kern County case are successful in getting a judge to strengthen or enforce the original injunction, the case could have nationwide implications, providing a legal strategy that could be replicated in communities where agents are using similar tactics. In Los Angeles and Southern California, agents have continued high-profile raids and violent tactics, despite a similar but separate temporary restraining order in the Central District, barring similar activity there.

As part of the original preliminary injunction, Border Patrol agents were required to provide the ACLU with documentation on their specific and individual reasonable suspicion for each warrantless stop.

The plaintiffs allege agents fabricated and copied and pasted boilerplate language for those reports from the raid at the Home Depot in south Sacramento.

According to the filing, dozens of armed and masked agents from the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies corralled people in the parking lot in Sacramento, ordering them not to move while demanding to see their papers.

Witnesses described unmarked Chevy trucks, agents dressed “like soldiers,” and people being grabbed and handcuffed with no explanation. At least one U.S. citizen was chased and detained during the operation, but Border Patrol won’t release that arrest report to the ACLU because the agency said it was unrelated to an immigration violation, according to the court documents. The agency told the media that the man slashed one of their tires in the parking lot.

Student detained near Home Depot sweep

Agents also tackled and arrested an 18-year-old high school student who happened to be walking to a nearby Ross, according to the ACLU and UFW’s motion.

Selvin Osbeli Mejia Diaz, a senior at Valley High School, fled violence in Central America last year and came to the United States as an unaccompanied minor. He lives with his aunt in Sacramento and is complying with the orders in his immigration court case seeking asylum, according to the ACLU and UFW motion.

According to his declaration, he was walking to the store to buy a shirt when an unmarked Chevy pulled up behind him. A masked agent burst out from the vehicle, tackled him to the ground, and handcuffed him without asking any questions, according to Mejia Diaz’s declaration.

“Everything happened very fast, and I felt very afraid because I did not know who the man was,” Mejia Diaz wrote in his declaration. “He was much taller than me and he used a lot of force, and he immediately handcuffed me while I was on the ground … I think they saw me and figured they could arrest me because I looked Latino.”

Mejia Diaz was born in Guatemala and turned himself in to border agents in June 2024 after crossing the U.S. border. After the Home Depot raid, he was taken to a detention center in downtown Sacramento, where he had to sleep on a hard ceramic floor with an aluminum blanket. He said he was detained for several days before he was allowed to call his aunt for a couple of minutes.

He is still being detained in the Imperial Regional Detention Facility.

The Border Patrol’s arrest report for Mejia Diaz incorrectly states he was in the Home Depot parking lot, the ACLU alleges, which they say supports their assertion that agents are using “copy and pasted” language for each arrest report.

Residents surround ICE and Border Patrol agents after an immigrant raid in the city of Bell on June 20.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

How the Border Patrol justified arrests

The ACLU also says that Border Patrol’s official documentation of the raid, required by the court order, is riddled with other factual errors and boilerplate language.

The forms, known as Form I-213s, are meant to document agents’ reasonable suspicions for each warrantless stop they make. During discovery, Border Patrol gave the ACLU 11 such arrest reports for the Sacramento raid. Three of them included “X” placeholders instead of specific information about locations or names or details for the arrests.

Nearly every report used identical language, claiming people “fled from agents” as a factor in the agents’ reasonable suspicion. Several witnesses told the ACLU some people did not run, according to the motion. The plaintiffs also argue that running from masked, armed men who do not identify themselves should not be enough for reasonable suspicion.

A handful of the reports justified the warrantless arrests by stating: “Sacramento, California has been identified as a city where many illegal aliens are known to stay, live and work without having any legal documentation in the United States.” Others noted that California is a sanctuary state.

“(Person) was located in California, which is a sanctuary state. Sanctuary states shield the identity of illegal aliens from immigration officials,” the arrest reports noted. The plaintiffs argue that someone being in a sanctuary state is not enough cause to give an agent reasonable suspicion that they are in the country illegally.

California’s sanctuary law curbs local law enforcement cooperation with immigration authorities and prevents the automatic transfer of people to federal immigration custody, except for people who have been convicted of serious or violent felonies.

Border Patrol would not provide reports for individuals who were detained but then released, the motion states. The ACLU is asking the judge to shorten the amount of time Border Patrol has to share the arrest reports from seven days to four days because many of the people detained in the Sacramento raid had already been deported by the time they got the arrest reports, according to their motion.

A hearing on the motion to enforce the injunction is set for October in Fresno.

Fry and Olmos write for Cal Matters, where this article originally appeared.