VENICE, Italy, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- A drama by Paul Schrader running in competition at Venice Film Festival won the 2017 Green Drop Award here on Friday.
"First Reformed" was recognized the prize during an awarding ceremony held at the Excelsior Hotel at Venice Lido, as "the most environmentalist movie" of the Fest's 74th edition.
"The film reminds us that first-person commitment is a choice always possible, however hard and painful that might be," the jury said.
"Among all the (selected) films, this one seemed the most significant to us, because it answers to the pressing question: what can we do?" jurors led by Italian renowned actress Giuliana De Sio added.
The American director's feature premiered here on Aug. 31, starring Ethan Hawke in the main role of a spiritual minister of an old church. Distraught by the loss of his son -- whom he had encouraged to enrol in the army -- the pastor embarks on the effort of helping a young woman, a parishioner, and her radical environmentalist husband.
As such, the story displays two parallel crises: the intimate one related to the minister's personal loss; and the second linked to his urge to do something for the environment.
Since 2012, the Green Drop Award is given by association Green Cross Italy to the film deemed to best represent the values of ecology and sustainable development at Venice Film Festival.
The group is the Italian branch of Green Cross International, which was founded by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1993, and is now present in some 32 countries, and recognized by the United Nations.
Its double goal is to favor movies addressing environmental issues -- to raise public awareness through such a popular medium -- and to foster environmentally-friendly practices within the cinema industry itself.
As organizers underlined at the ceremony, Schrader's was only one of the many movies running in Venice this year that brought on the screen the issues of climate change and environmental deterioration, and how these problems affect humans.
For example, in Darren Aranofsky's horror "Mother!", the increasingly destructive path of the protagonists would symbolize the devastation caused on environment by humans and by their insatiable needs.
Alexander Payne's "Downsizing" imagined a world in which scientists become able to shrink humanity for the major reason of reducing its impact on the earth and the natural resources.
Every year, the winners of the Green Drop Award would receive a trophy, always a Murano glass artefact shaped into a hollow drop of water.
For this edition, it was filled with samples of soil dating from roughly 66 million years ago, when the mass extinction of dinosaurs is believed to have occurred.
Schrader had already left Venice, and was not able to receive it personally. Yet, he welcomed the prize with a message. "Many films today address the crises we are going through, and especially the environmental one," the director said. "In my own movie, I tried to explore the intimate feelings of human beings, when they come to face such problems... Because we all need to find an answer to this condition of anxiety."
