Claude Lelouch to Receive Cartier Filmmaker Award at Venice Film Festival

“A Man and a Woman” director Claude Lelouch is set to receive the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

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The annual award is given to “a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry,” according to a press release. An awards ceremony for Lelouch will take place on Sept. 2 before the out-of-competition premiere of his new film “Finalement.”

“Finalement” stars Kad Merad, Elsa Zylberstain, Michel Boujenah, Sandrine Bonnaire, Barbara Pravi and Françoise Gillard. Its official synopsis reads: “In an increasingly crazy world, Lino, who has decided to leave everything behind, will realize that in the end: everything that happens to us is for our own good!”

Lelouch is the celebrated French director of films including “Money Money Money” (1972), “Happy New Year” (1973), “Itinerary of a Spoiled Child” (1988) and “The Beautiful Story” (1991). Arguably his biggest success, 1966’s “A Man and a Woman” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival and went on to win two Oscars for best original screenplay and foreign language film.

In a statement, Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera called Lelouch “one of the top directors of French cinema, an excellent interpreter of its ‘quality,’ albeit alien to its main currents.”

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He continued, “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.”

Added Cartier president and CEO Cyrille Vigneron: “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?”

This year’s Venice Film Festival runs from Aug. 28 to Sept. 7.

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