Mirren won for her depiction of Leo Tolstoy’s wife in Michael Hoffman’s “The Last Station,” while Meryl Streep picked up a career achievement award.

The winning movie, “Brotherhood,” takes a hard look at the neo-Nazi group that the leading character, Lars, joins after leaving the army. The group carries out raids on homosexuals, but Lars and his mentor in the group, Jimmy, begin a love affair that they try to keep secret.

“Brotherhood” is the first feature film by Nicolo Donato, a 35-year-old who previously worked as a fashion photographer.

The jury handing out the awards was headed by Oscar-winning director Milos Forman.

The best actor award went to Italy’s Sergio Castellitto, who played a single parent and blue-collar worker dreaming that his son will become a boxing champ in the movie “Alza la Testa.”

The festival paid homage to Streep through the career award and a retrospective of her work. Her cooking flick “Julie & Julia,” in which she plays Julia Child, was shown out of competition and was chosen to close the festival.

At the award ceremony, a black-clad Streep was presented with the career achievement prize by Giuseppe Tornatore, the Italian director who won an Oscar for best foreign film with “Cinema Paradiso.”

Smaller marches wound through the capitals of heavily Catholic Poland and in Croatia, where counterdemonstrators shouted anti-gay and nationalist slogans.

In Rome, costumed demonstrators carrying rainbow flags and signs reading “freedom for all” attacked the conservative government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

They demanded rights for same-sex couples and the recognition of gay marriage.

Activists dressed as fake clergy with colorful hats and signs reading “No Vatican” protested what they say is the church’s excessive influence on Italy’s policies.

Organizers said Saturday was not a special day for gay pride but that most such parades are organized around June 28, marking the 1969 landmark Stonewall riots in New York, considered the birth of the gay rights movement.

In Warsaw, hundreds of gay and lesbian activists marched, also calling for legal unions between same-sex couples.

About 1,500 demonstrators marched along Warsaw’s main Marszalkowska Street under escort, police said. Several dozen right-wing youths shouting anti-gay invective confronted the parade near the Parliament building, but there were no confrontations, police said.

Some previous gay demonstrations have been marked by violence.

Homosexuals were a taboo subject in Poland under communism. Since the 1990 democratic changes, gays have been campaigning for equal rights, but marriage in Poland is only legal between a man and a woman.

In Croatia, another mostly Roman Catholic country, about 500 gay activists marched through Zagreb.

No violence was reported, but about 50 people held a counterdemonstration and shouted anti-gay slogans. One was led away by police after trying to break through a cordon that authorities had created around the Gay Pride parade to protect it.

In many ways, the Roman Emperor Hadrian and his 2,000-year-old world sound familiar.

A new exhibition at the British Museum aims to show that Hadrian, best remembered for building a 117-kilometer wall to separate England and Scotland, is a leader whose achievements and contradictions helped forge our times.

“Hadrian is one of the great Roman emperors,” exhibition curator Thorsten Opper said. “He takes over the empire at a time of acute military crisis, he stabilizes that empire and he assures its survival.

“In a sense, he made the world we still live in today.”

That’s a bold claim for a man who died in AD 138, but “Hadrian: Empire and Conflict,” which opens to the public Thursday, makes a strong case.

Under Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan, the Roman Empire stretched from Britannia (modern-day Britain) to Mesopotamia _ today’s Iraq. But its armies were overstretched and rebels harried its fringes. Hadrian’s first act on taking power in AD 117 was to pull troops out of Mesopotamia, where insurgency raged. He went on to trim back the limits of his empire and consolidate Roman power.

He loved architecture and ordered a flurry of construction _ homes, temples, new cities, that famous wall.

A surprising amount remains today. The wall still snakes across moor and dale in northern England. In Italy, there is Hadrian’s vast villa at Tivoli – the holiday home to end all holiday homes -and Rome’s Pantheon, one of the best-preserved and most beautiful of all classical buildings. Its giant dome has inspired buildings from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to Turkish mosques to the British Museum itself.

The exhibition is being held in the museum’s round Reading Room, whose domed roof, Opper said, is “a Victorian version of the Pantheon.”

Opper said every generation reinvents historical figures in its own image, and Hadrian is no exception.

“The empire-builders, the Victorians, saw him almost as a weak figure because he withdrew,” Opper said. “After the horrors of World War I and World War II, he was seen as the sort of prince of peace that the world needed. Our picture of Hadrian changes constantly based on our own experience.”

The show paints a highly attractive picture of Hadrian. An introductory film bills him: “Warrior. Dreamer. Visionary.” He is virile and energetic, a military commander, perceptive ruler and part-time poet. He’s even a bit of a gay icon who deified his dead male lover, Antinous _ the cult caught on, rivaling Christianity among the masses – and founded a city in his honor.

The 255-year-old British Museum has developed a knack for assembling populist but critically praised shows that set a historical figure in a modern context. The exhibitions have helped make the museum Britain’s most popular tourist attraction, with six million visitors last year.

Museum director Neil MacGregor said the Hadrian show is one of four linked exhibitions “looking at a great reign that is resonating on through history.” It follows last year’s exhibition about China’s first emperor and his terra-cotta warriors, which drew 850,000 visitors. Upcoming shows will look at Persia’s Shah Abbas and the Aztec king Montezuma.

The museum has gathered more than 170 objects for Hadrian show, some from its own collection and others loaned from 31 institutions in 11 countries. They range from the monumental – including a giant marble head of Hadrian found in Turkey last year – to domestic items such as notes from soldiers stationed at remote outposts on Hadrian’s Wall.

There is a poignant display of everyday items left behind by Jews who hid in caves as Hadrian’s Roman forces crushed an uprising led by charismatic rebel leader Simon bar Kokhba in AD 132. The Roman historian Cassius Dio estimated that 580,000 people were killed.

Among the artifacts found in the “Cave of Letters” in the Judean Desert are knives with perfectly preserved wooden handles, jewelry boxes and hand mirrors, a beautiful glass bowl and the keys to hastily abandoned houses.

“They look as if they could have been used yesterday,” Opper said of the artifacts, on loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. “But they belonged to people who all perished.

“That gives quite a different picture of Hadrian and of Roman power. Not the great civilizing power here, but brutal imperialism.”

“Hadrian: Empire and Conflict” runs until Oct. 26 and will not travel.