by Stefania Fumo

VENICE, Italy, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- Two-time Oscar winning Mexican film director Alfonso Cuaron has won the top prize at the 75th Venice Film Festival, the Golden Lion, with his movie Roma.

Distributed by Netflix and shot in black and white, the semi-autobiographical drama shot in a realist style chronicles the life of a middle-class family in a Mexico City neighborhood called Roma in the early 1970s.

The Silver Lion went to Parisian filmmaker Jacques Audiard for The Sister Brothers, a two-hour movie starring Riz Ahmed, Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly in a tale of two brothers -- one evil, the other a little less so -- who shoot their way across the Wild West while also working out the kinks in their relationship.

American writer-director duo Joel and Ethan Coen, winners of four Oscars and the Palme d'Or at Cannes, garnered the Best Screenplay award for the Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a cheerfully violent "anthology Western" told in six chapters with six different storylines, all centering on a man named Buster Scruggs.

Iconic American actor Willem Dafoe won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor for his performance in American director Julian Schnabel's tribute to legendary painter Vincent van Gogh, titled At Eternity's Gate

The Coppa Volpi for best actress went to British actress Olivia Colman, who turned in a powerful performance as a lonely and invalid Queen Anne in England in the early 18th century in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos' period drama The Favourite.

The Nightingale by Australian director Jennifer Kent, the only female director selected in the main competition, won the Special Jury Prize, while the Marcello Mastroianni acting prize for emerging actors went to Baykali Ganambarr, who played in the movie.