Director, writer and producer Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48 Hrs., Last Man Standing) is the recipient of the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award of the 79th Venice International Film Festival. The award is dedicated to a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry.
The award ceremony for Walter Hill will take place on Tuesday September 6th 2022, before the screening Out of Competition of his new film, Dead For A Dollar with Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Brosnahan, and Benjamin Bratt.
1897. Dead For A Dollar follows veteran bounty hunter Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz) deep into Mexico where he encounters professional gambler and outlaw Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe) – a sworn enemy who Max sent to prison years before. Borlund is on a mission to find and return Rachel Kidd (Rachel Brosnahan), the hostage wife of a wealthy Santa Fe businessman. Discovering that Mrs. Kidd has actually fled from an abusive marriage, Max is ultimately faced with a choice: finish the dishonest job he’s been hired to accomplish or stand aside while ruthless mercenary outlaws and his long-time rival close in… Max and his partner Alonzo Poe (Warren Burke) have nothing to gain if they resist — nothing save honor.
In accepting, Walter Hill has declared: “In the film world, one knows it’s a great honor to be invited for a special screening at the Venice Film Festival. With my new film Dead For A Dollar, this is the fourth time that I’ve been so fortunate, and now this award makes me yet more grateful. My thanks to Alberto Barbera, Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, Cartier and the entire film community that has given me so much support and encouragement over the years. Thank you all, you’ve made an old man happy.”
Welcoming this announcement, the Director of the Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera has stated: “Both inside and outside of tradition, Walter Hill constantly redraws the contours of the genres that form the horizons of his cinema – if nothing else, in order to transcend conventions in his nonstop search for a constructive relationship with the legacy of the American legend, inherited from classic cinema, and, on the other hand, for authentic modernity in ethics and form. Whether it be westerns, thrillers, horror, war films, or detective movies, Hill never refrains from making them an opportunity to create formal and narrative geometries that aim to recount modern times through genre stereotypes and to propose an aesthetic point of view that disregards and goes beyond the traditional demarcation line between good and evil. An auteur in the full sense of the term, Walter Hill nevertheless has no problem recognizing himself as a specialist in action movies, whose violence is subjugated to various degrees of stylization, and his search for new visual effects is conducted through constant experimentation on how to use the various possibilities offered by the film language.”
The 79th Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia will be held from August 31st to September 10th, 2022.