Canadian director David
Cronenberg will be awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime
Achievement during the 2018 Venice Film Festival, organizers
said on Thursday.
The decision was made by a meeting of the Venice Biennale's
board of directors, chaired by Paolo Baratta, following a
proposal by the Festival Director Alberto Barbera.
"I've always loved the Golden Lion of Venice," Cronenberg
said on the website of the world's oldest cinema festival, which
runs from August 29 to September 8 this year.
"A lion that flies on golden wings -that's the essence of
art, isn't it? The essence of cinema.
"It will be almost unbearably thrilling to receive a Golden
Lion of my own".
Cronenberg's films include Shivers, Rabid, Fast Company, The
Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch,
Crash, eXistenz, The Dead Zone, M. Butterfly, Spider, A History
of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis
and Maps to the Stars.
"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," Barbera said.
"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."
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