Actor, producer & director Keanu Reeves along with director, screenwriter & producer Terrence Malick, and Director, actor, screenwriter & producer, the late Orson Welles (1915 – 1985) will be honored at the upcoming 41st Deauville American Film Festival with a Tribute and a retrospective of their movies.
Forever Neo from Matrix, Jonathan Harker in Dracula or Le Chevalier Danceny in Dangerous Liaisons, Keanu Reeves has demonstrated his ability to take on extremely varied roles during his long and impressive movie career. He has worked with directors such as Gus Van Sant, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and more recently Richard Linklater.
In 2013, he played Kai, the heroic slave who led a Samurai revolt in 47 Ronin by Carl Rinsch. Underlining his love for martial arts, that same year he completed his first film as director, Man of Tai Chi, an initiation tale co-produced by China and the United States and inspired by the life of the stuntman Tiger Chen.
The Deauville American Film Festival pays tribute to him in person, and is holding a retrospective of his stand-out movies.
In addition to the Tribute, the Deauville American Film Festival will premiere director, screenwriter and producer Terrence Malick’s new film Knight of Cups, as well as The Tree of Life and To the Wonder.
“In an age when Man is sidelined in the face of the world, we thought it was the right time to honor a cineaste who places humanism at the heart of his artistic concerns. Refusing the nihilism of the nothingness of days, Terrence Malick films the essence of poetry by examining the peaks and troughs of transcendence through our behavior and our senses. We can say that his art is both harmonious and sacred. The experience he offers through his films carry us to that delicious point of going beyond the ‘self’ to the benefit of being, thus making his filmmaking unique, necessary and primordial. He turns our meanderings into the pathways of life,” comments Bruno Barde, Festival Director.
To mark the centenary of the birth of Orson Welles, the festival is offering the chance to see or see again three of his feature films, along with a documentary about this enduring legend of world cinema, who at an early age reinvented the grammar of his art with his masterpiece Citizen Kane. François Truffaut spoke of how Welles had inspired so many filmmaking careers. He also put his stamp of innovation on films such as Falstaff, Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil.
As part of this tribute, the festival will be screening Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, and Touch of Evil, as well as the documentary This Is Orson Welles by Clara and Julia Kuperberg, produced by TCM Cinema and Wichita Films.