Ovation for Emma Thompson as low-budget art wins over hype in Venice

The 60th Venice festival, the only major film festival with two fully fledged competitions judged by separate international juries, ended with two surprises.

The first was to award its Golden Lion to a small-scale first film from Russia. The second was to give its Premio San Marco for the second competition to the second film of an Iraqi Kurd.

The combined budgets of the winning movies was almost certainly less than the cost of any of the more expensive productions viewed by the juries - a rare triumph for art over money and hype.

There was nothing for Britain, despite the fact that Michael Winterbottom, who won this year's Berlin festival with In This World, was represented by Code 46, a beautifully made science fiction film.

Not surprisingly, Christopher Hampton's Raising Argentina, starring Emma Thompson as one of those who "disappeared" during the Argentinian military junta's regime, failed to find favour. But, though it was booed during its press show, the film was given six minutes of applause after its public showing, and a a relieved and weeping Thompson acknowledged an ovation.

The Russian surprise was Andrej Zvjagintsev's The Return, which beat the heavily touted and much applauded Italian entry, Good day, Good night, by Marco Bellocchio, a film about the Red Brigades' 1968 kidnapping of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro. Bellochio's film won best screenplay, but Italian critics considered it to have been hard done by.

The Return has two boys living alone with their mother and suddenly faced with the return of their long-absent father, who takes them on a summer fishing expedition with tragic consequences. There was real-life tragedy for one of the boys, who was drowned in the same lake near St Petersburg while on holiday after making the film.

The Iraqi film was Hiner Saleem's Vodka Lemon, an international co-production made in Armenia because it was impossible to shoot it in Iraq, about an old widower looking for a new wife in a remote and poverty-stricken village. Saleem, who lives and works in France, has plans to return to Iraq and attempt a film in his own country.

The main jury gave its best director award to Takeshi Kitano, the Japanese director, writer and actor whose samurai epic, Zatoichi, included jokes and even musical numbers as well as spectacular sword fights.

Sean Penn won the best actor prize for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams, and Katja Riemann was named best actress for her role in Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse.

Randa Chahal Sabbag's The Kite, from the Lebanon, won the special jury prize.

Finally, the international critics' prizes went to Taiwan and India, with Tsai Ming Liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn and Manish Jha's A Country Without Women.