Director and screenwriter Paul Schrader will receive the Golden Lion of Venice award

American director and screenwriter Paul Schrader will be awarded the honorary Golden Lion at the upcoming Venice Film Festival, which will take place from August 31 to September 10announced by its organizers today.

“I feel deeply honored. Venice is my Lion in my heart”, the director celebrated the Lion of the Race, which was decided by the Mostra Board of Directors after a proposal from the event director, Alberto Barbera.

masterpiece screenwriter

Schrader, screenwriter of masterpieces such as Taxi driver (1976) at director from others such as blue necklace (1978) o American Gigolo (1980), is considered a central figure of New Hollywood, who changed the concept and aesthetics of cinema in the ’60s, including steven spielberg, Martin ScorseseFrancis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Brian DePalma.

“We are not exaggerating when we say that one of the most important American authors of his generationa filmmaker heavily influenced by European cinema and culture, a screenwriter who is stubbornly independent but easy to navigate the Hollywood system, ”Barbera praises.

The filmmaker is especially appreciated for his visual style, which puts him “in the most modern forms of unconventional but subtle investigating contemporary cinema.”

“A contemporaneity that Schrader faces not only in tireless intellectual and human curiosity, but also in a fascinating ability to navigate the technological evolution of cinema and its production and distribution systems,” he concludes. .

an exemplary career

Schrader (born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1946) wrote and directed more than thirty films, occasionally collaborating with his brother Leonard, who died in 2006.

His last work, The card counter (2021), along with Oscar Isaac, Tiffani Haddish and Willem Dafoe, competed for the Golden Lion in the last Mostra, a tournament they will go through several times in their long careers.

After his beginnings as a film critic, with a book still being studied, Transcendental style in film; Ozu, Bresson, Dreyerthe filmmaker entered the world of cinema distinguishing himself in his script novels as in Yakuza (1974) for Sidney Pollack u obsession (1976) by Brian de Palma.

Then came the collaborations with Martin Scorsese, in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull (1980), The final temptation to Christ (1988) at Rise of the dead (1999), and made his directorial debut in blue necklace.

In 2019 Schrader was Oscar nominee for the thriller script The priestwith Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried, exactly screened at the 2017 Venetian Mostra.

Venetian Biennale president Roberto Cicutto recalled that this year Mostra celebrated 90 years since the release of the first film in 1932, resulting in the world’s oldest international festival. There were eleven editions that were not held due to war and other reasons.

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