The 67th Venice Film Festival, which runs September 1-11, will pay tribute to Indian film-maker Mani Ratman (pictured).

Indian film-maker Mani Ratnam will receive the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award at this year’s Venice International Film Festival.

Previous recipients include Takeshi Kitano, Abbas Kiarostami, Agnès Varda, and Sylvester Stallone.

Venice will also host the festival premiere of Ratnam’s upcoming film Raavan, which the director will attend along with the film’s composer, A.R. Rahman, and its stars Aishwarya Rai, Abhishek Bachchan and Tamil actor Vikram.

Explaining this year’s choice, Venice director Marco Mueller said that Ratnam helped introduce the auteur concept to contemporary Bollywood, and is one of a handful of film-makers to handle the transition from the regional to all-India market. Born in Chennai, Ratnam started out making films in Tamil but has also made some successful Hindi movies.

“Raavan will enchant audiences with its stirring drama and entrancing musical sequences,” said Mueller. “We are proud to be hosting the festival premiere of this wonderful film, which will be presented at the 2010 Mostra in both the Hindi and the Tamil version.”

Raavan is produced in association with Reliance Big Pictures and sold internationally by IM Global.

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