COLIN FARRELL HAS won the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival Saturday for playing a man rejected by his best friend in the Irish film The Banshees of Inisherin.

The film reunites Farrell, 46, with Brendan Gleeson and writer-director Martin McDonagh following their gangster comedy In Bruges.

AFP reported that Farrell said he was “utterly shocked and thrilled” to receive the gong for the role. 

The film premiered in competition at the Italian festival, which also saw Cate Blanchett named Best Actress for her performance playing a renowned, hard-driving lesbian conductor in Tar.

The Australian, 53, won the same award at the festival in 2007 for her performance as Bob Dylan.

The festival’s top award – the Golden Lion prize – went to All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary looking at the activism that exposed the family behind the US opioid crisis.

Directed by Laura Poitras, 58, it follows US photographer Nan Goldin, who led efforts to make the billionaire Sackler family — whose company manufactured and marketed OxyContin — publically accountable for their role in the opioid crisis.

Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino won the best director award for Bones and All, a film described as a romantic horror film starring screen idol Timothee Chalamet.

Elsewhere, jailed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi received a special Jury prize  for his film-within-a-film in which he plays the protagonist, “No Bears.”

Panahi, who won the top prize Golden Lion in Venice in 2000, was jailed in July along with two other filmmakers during the latest crackdown on Iranian civil society.

Additional reporting by AFP