Career Venice Golden Lion for Cronenberg (3)

(ANSA) - Venice, April 19 - 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."