Luca Guadagnino will receive the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
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The Italian director, who is premiering his seven-hour Bernardo Bertolucci documentary “Joie de Vivre” at this year’s festival, is being honored as “a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry,” according to a press release. Guadagnino will be presented the award in a ceremony on Sept. 8 before the premiere of “Joie de Vivre.”
“It might seem like a rhetorical gesture to say I am honored to receive the Glory to the Filmmaker award, but it is the plain truth for many reasons,” Guadagnino said in a statement. “To be honored for one’s craft or life as a filmmaker is an ambition that no one who makes films could ever presume to imagine achieving — especially by joining a group of filmmakers who have received this prestigious honor before me and to whom I owe so much of my development. So, I want to emphasize once again what an honor it is to receive this award, especially from Alberto Barbera and La Biennale di Venezia. Thank you, thank you!”
Added Barbera: “The Glory to the Filmmaker Award celebrates in Luca Guadagnino an author who has managed to transform his curiosity into a form of creative freedom. Defying alignment with any single school or movement, he has established himself as a global director, capable of working with leading international actors and producers. He has navigated diverse genres — from melodrama to horror, coming-of-age to psychological thriller — while maintaining a consistent and recognizable voice, without ever losing a deeply Italian identity in portraying bodies, settings and history. His is a vital cinema that does not shy away from risk: nomadic, sensual, sophisticated yet widely accessible, where intellectual provocation and emotion, memory and modernity coexist brilliantly. Glory to the Filmmaker honors the originality of a vision that has succeeded in renewing the language of contemporary cinema, celebrating a career that has brought Italian auteurship into a true dialogue with the entire world.”