Posted by Larry Gleeson

David Cronenberg will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for directors at the 75th Venice International Film Festival (August 29 – September 8, 2018).

Accepting the award, David Cronenberg declared: “I’ve always loved the Golden Lion of Venice. 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.”

The decision was made by the Board of Directors of the Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, who espoused the proposal made by the Festival Director, Alberto Barbera.

With regard to this prize, 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.”

(Source: labiennale.org)