French director, writer and producer Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman, Happy New Year, The Beautiful Story) is the recipient of the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award of the 81st 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 Claude Lelouch will take place before the screening Out of Competition of his new film, Finalement, with Kad Merad, Elsa Zylberstain, Michel Boujenah, Sandrine Bonnaire, Barbara Pravi e Françoise Gillard.
Directed by Lelouch, Finalement synopsis reads, “In an increasingly crazy world, Lino, who has decided to leave everything behind, will realize that in the end: everything that happens to us is for our own good!”
Alberto Barbera, director of the Venice Film Festival commented, “Claude Lelouch is one of the top directors of French cinema, an excellent interpreter of its ‘quality,’ albeit alien to its main currents; he is also a very prolific filmmaker, having directed over sixty feature films. A precocious film lover, the author of shorts and musical videos, a cinematographer, screenwriter, actor, and producer, he achieved international success in 1966 with his movie A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme), which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and two Oscars in 1967, for Best Foreign Language Film and for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay. The soundtrack by Francis Lai became the legendary refrain of an era and Lelouch has left an indelible mark on the cinema of his time, above all by capturing the taste and the favor of the public. An atypical and unclassifiable filmmaker, he likes to contaminate genres (dramas, comedies, crime films, adventure movies, westerns, science fiction, musicals, war movies, and historical settings) and doesn’t hesitate to shuffle conventions, creating unorthodox narrative and temporal structures. Many of his successes are unforgettable, such as Money Money Money (L’aventure, c’est l’aventure, 1972), Happy New Year (La bonne année, 1973), Itinerary of a Spoiled Child (Itinéraire d’un enfant gâté, 1988), and The Beautiful Story (La belle histoire, 1991), examples of a type of cinema that is stylistically sophisticated, attuned to melodrama and choral comedy, and with a proverbial talent for story-telling. Not to mention technically avant-garde: his short film Rendezvous (C’etait un rendez-vous, 1976), a 9-minute Steadicam sequence shot as he speeds down the streets of Paris in a Mercedes, is a reference point for anyone who has a ‘physical’ relationship with movie cameras. In over 60 years of activity, and with exceptionally talented actors such as Anouk Aimée, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Françoise Fabian, Lino Ventura, Belmondo, and Fabrice Luchini, Claude Lelouch has created the modern geography of a cinema of emotions.”
The 81st Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia will be held from August 28th to September 7th, 2024.