David Cronenberg receives Golden Lion award at Venice Film Festival

C Sandroni photo

By

Cecilia Sandroni

Director David Cronenberg on Thursday received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for directors at the 75th International Film Festival of the Biennale di Venezia.

During the Ceremony, Mexican director and the festival’s jury president Guillermo Del Toro said Cronenberg “kept the fierce independence of art.”

With regard to the prize, Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera declared: “Although Cronenberg was originally relegated to the margins of the horror genre, right from his first, scandalously subversive movies, the director has shown that he wants to take his audiences well beyond the cinema of exploitation, as he constructs an original and highly personal structure, movie after movie. Revolving around the inseparable relationship of body, sex, and death, his universe is populated by grotesque deformities and terrifying couplings, a horror which reflects the fear of mutations inflicted on bodies by science and technology, of disease and physical decay, of the unresolved conflict between spirit and flesh. Violence, sexual transgression, confusion between what is real and what is virtual, the image’s deforming role in contemporary society: these are a few of the recurring themes which have helped make him one of the most daring and stimulating filmmakers ever, a tireless innovator of forms and languages.”

On receiving the award, Cronenberg said the Golden Lion statuette, which is in the shape of a lion with wings – a symbol of the city of Venice – represented “the monster of art and of truth.”

The ceremony was followed by the screening of M Butterfly (1993) a new film for most of the public in the Grande Sala. Cronenberg was, in the late afternoon, at the Villa delle Giornate degli Autori for a celebration of Canadian cinema in Venice (all sections included) with the Canadian Ambassador Alexandra Bugailiskis, and the Director of Giornate, Giorgio Gosetti.

Cecilia Sandroni

Cecilia Sandroni is a member of the Foreign Press in Rome, in addition to being an expert of international relations in communication. Her skills range from film to photography with a passion for human rights. Independent, creative, concrete, she has collaborated with major Italian and foreign institutions for the realization of cultural and civil projects.