La Biennale di Venezia and Cartier announce that the great French director, writer and producer Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman, Happy New Year, The Beautiful Story) is the recipient of the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award of the 811h Venice International Film Festival (August 28th – September 7th, 2024), dedicated to a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry.
The award ceremony for Claude Lelouch will take place on Monday September 2nd 2024 in the Sala Grande (Palazzo del Cinema) before the screening Out of Competition of his new work, Finalement (France, 127’), with Kad Merad, Elsa Zylberstain, Michel Boujenah, Sandrine Bonnaire, Barbara Pravi e Françoise Gillard.
Welcoming this announcement, the Director of the Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera has stated: «Claude Lelouch is one of the top directors of French cinema, an excellent interpreter of its ‘quality,’ albeit alien to its main currents; he is also a very prolific filmmaker, having directed over sixty feature films. A precocious film lover, the author of shorts and musical videos, a cinematographer, screenwriter, actor, and producer, he achieved international success in 1966 with his movie A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme), which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and two Oscars in 1967, for Best Foreign Language Film and for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay.
The soundtrack by Francis Lai became the legendary refrain of an era and Lelouch has left an indelible mark on the cinema of his time, above all by capturing the taste and the favor of the public. An atypical and unclassifiable filmmaker, he likes to contaminate genres (dramas, comedies, crime films, adventure movies, westerns, science fiction, musicals, war movies, and historical settings) and doesn’t hesitate to shuffle conventions, creating unorthodox narrative and temporal structures. Many of his successes are unforgettable, such as Money Money Money (L’aventure, c’est l’aventure, 1972), Happy New Year (La bonne année, 1973), Itinerary of a Spoiled Child (Itinéraire d’un enfant gâté, 1988), and The Beautiful Story (La belle histoire, 1991), examples of a type of cinema that is stylistically sophisticated, attuned to melodrama and choral comedy, and with a proverbial talent for story-telling.
Not to mention technically avant-garde: his short film Rendezvous (C’etait un rendez-vous, 1976), a 9-minute Steadicam sequence shot as he speeds down the streets of Paris in a Mercedes, is a reference point for anyone who has a ‘physical’ relationship with movie cameras. In over 60 years of activity, and with exceptionally talented actors such as Anouk Aimée, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Françoise Fabian, Lino Ventura, Belmondo, and Fabrice Luchini, Claude Lelouch has created the modern geography of a cinema of emotions».
“Claude Lelouch career resembles a symphony played out across a lifetime. His filmography spans over sixty-four years, with many awards winning films, including the mythical pairing of Jean Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée, who incarnate for eternity the romantic couple, and have brought to the world, thanks to Francis Lai, Lelouch partner in crime, an unforgettable soundtrack. “Chabadabada” has been hummed by an entire generation and is part of the cinema music mythos”, has declared Cyrille Vigneron President and CEO of Cartier, “Lelouch’s characters are incredibly human, his life stories stay in our minds, in particular his unwavering obsession for beautiful love stories. What would Love do without Claude Lelouch to express its unstoppable power?”
Directed by Claude Lelouch, Finalement is produced by Les Films 13 and co-produced by France 2 Cinéma and Laurent Dassault Rond-Point, with the support of Canal + and with the participation of Ciné + e France Télévisions. French Distribution: Metropolitan Filmexport.
