Italian Documentary Takes Top Prize at Venice Film Festival

“Sacro GRA,” a film by the Italian director Gianfranco Rosi about the unique characters living around Rome’s ring road, became the first documentary to win the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend. It was the first year that nonfiction films were admitted to competition, and the first time an Italian director had won since Gianni Amelio for “The Way We Laughed” in 1998.

The film, which features drag queens, paramedics, and an impoverished aristocrat among its subjects, focuses on people living on the margins, on the periphery of Rome, whose historic landmarks are never shown in the film.

Writing in Corriere della Sera, the critic Stefania Ulivi said that the film “picks up where Paolo Sorrentino left off in ‘The Great Beauty,’” that director’s new film about elegant, decadent Rome.

In accepting the award on Saturday, Mr. Rosi said that he had never expected to win. He added that he had once thought of the road only as a way to get to the airport, before he began to look more closely.

The film’s title is a pun on the Italian word for the holy grail, a commentary on the difficult lives of those living on the outskirts of the Italian capital. Mr. Rosi’s earlier work includes “Boatman,” a documentary about India, and “Below Sea Level” (2008), about people living below sea level.

The jurors of the Venice Film Festival gave the Silver Lion for best director to Alexandros Avranas for “Miss Violence,” a film about a young girl who commits suicide as a result of sexual abuse, and the Jury Prize to “Jiaoyou” by the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang.

The versatile Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope won for best screenplay for “Philomena,” directed by Stephen Frears and starring Judi Dench and Mr. Coogan, and the director Noaz Deshe won the award for best debut film for “White Shadow,” about albinos in Africa.

The award for best actor went to Themis Panou for his performance in “Miss Violence” and best actress went to Elena Cotta, for hers in “Via Castellana Bandiera,” the first film directed by the theater director Emma Dante, about an intense showdown between two women on a Palermo street.