Pedro Almodóvar will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 76th Venice Film Festival (Aug 28-Sept 7).
“I am very excited and honoured with the gift of this Golden Lion,” said the Spanish filmmaker. “I have very good memories of the Venice Film Festival. My international debut took place there in 1983 with Dark Habits. It was the first time one of my films travelled out of Spain, it was my international baptism and a wonderful experience, as it was my return with Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown in 1988. This Lion is going to become my pet, along with the two cats I live with. Thanks from the bottom of my heart for giving me this award”.
Festival director Alberto Barbera said: “Almodóvar isn’t only the greatest and most influential Spanish director since Buñuel, he is a filmmaker who has offered us the most multifaceted, controversial, and provocative portraits of post-Franco Spain. The topics of transgression, desire, and identity are the terrain of choice for his films, which he imbues with corrosive humor and adorns with a visual splendor that confers unusual radiance on the aesthetic camp and pop art to which he explicitly refers.”
Almodóvar’s Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown won the screenplay prize at Venice in 1988 before going on to win a host of international nominations.
The filmmaker won his first best foreign film Oscar for All About My Mother in 1999. The film had also won the best director prize at Cannes. Almodovar won the Academy Award for best original screenplay for Talk to Her in 2002.
His most recent film, Pain And Glory, was well received at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with leading man Antonio Banderas winning the best actor award.
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