The Venice Film Festival hands out its top awards on Saturday after two weeks of often dark, violent programming including a chilling Israeli-made documentary about Gaza and an oddball drama starring John Malkovich.

“NAZA”, which features Israeli whistleblowers analysing the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, earned a record 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere on Thursday and is the highest-scored film by international critics, according to film magazine Screen.

But it faces competition from other well-received movies, including poignant relationship study “Possible Love” by South Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong, and dark comedy “Wild Horse Nine” by British-Irish director Martin McDonagh.

The latter features Malkovich playing a jaded CIA agent taking a break with a colleague on Easter Island in Chile ahead of the 1973 American-backed military coup there in a performance that has seen him tipped by some critics for Oscar glory.

As a director of one of the few films that had audiences laughing in Venice, director McDonagh said his acid sense of humour was his way of coping with the state of the world.

“The only way to deal with it is through humour and to try not to be ground down by it,” he told AFP.

Others tackled issues from war, corruption or economic inequality, with intensely personal stories about people faced with clear moral choices but who end up compromising themselves.

That was the case for the widely hailed “DAU” about Soviet nuclear scientist Lev Landau, Danny Boyle’s “Ink” about Britain’s The Sun tabloid newspaper, or “Primetime” starring Robert Pattinson as an ambitious paedophile-hunting TV presenter.

The only feature film directed by a woman in competition was the ironically titled “Woman Unknown” by Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy — and a victory on Saturday night would send a clear message about gender representation at the festival.

“I would have loved to have more female colleagues in competition,” the director told AFP after the premiere of the World War II drama about a bride-to-be hiding the shame of her past relationship with a Nazi.

Providing some more tender fare about the wonder of friendship was Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda who presented “Look Back”, an adaptation of a top-selling manga about two schoolgirls who dream of becoming manga artists.

– Jury decision –

The Venice Golden Lion for best film is one of the industry’s most prestigious awards and serves as marketing gold dust for a film while also boosting its chances in Hollywood’s end-of-year awards season.

If chosen, Israeli-made “NAZA” by Oscar winners Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor would be a politically charged decision from the jury, which is headed this year by US actress-director Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Based on testimony from 24 Israeli whistleblowers, all of them with digitally altered identities, “NAZA” provides detailed first-hand accounts of the AI-powered bombing of Gaza, where 73,500 have been killed since October 2023, according to the Hamas-run health ministry there.

“It’s like a video game because everything is done remotely,” one interviewee said of using the targeting system which has been used to flatten most of the besieged enclave.

The Israeli military criticised the use of anonymous testimonies in the film, saying on Friday the identities of the whistleblowers “cannot be verified”.

The film’s hand-aching 25-minute ovation at the premiere is no guarantee of success — documentaries are a relatively new inclusion in the main competition of film festivals and rarely emerge as winners.

Last year, docudrama “The Voice of Hind Rajab” about the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl by Israeli troops in Gaza was given a then-record 23-minute ovation by shell-shocked festival-goers, but went home with second prize.

Amid rumours of resignation threats and rows on the jury, American director Alexander Payne and his team of fellow panellists opted instead for the uncontroversial “Father Mother Sister Brother” from Jim Jarmusch.

The closing ceremony starts in Venice from 7 pm (1700 GMT).