Spanish director Pedro
Almodóvar on Thursday got the Golden Lion for Lifetime
Achievement for directors at the 76th Venice International Film
Festival.
Accepting the award, Almodóvar said he remembered when he
debuted with Dark Habits in 1983, saying the jury chaired by
Sergio Leone and including Lina Wertmuller "liked it but
festival director Gianluigi Rondi thought it was obscene".
"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.
"Lovesickness, the heartache of abandonment, the
contradictions of desire, and the lacerations of depression
converge in movies that straddle melodrama and its parody,
achieving peaks of emotional authenticity that redeem any
potential formal excess.
"Without forgetting that Almodóvar excels, above all, in
painting incredibly original female portraits, thanks to an
exceptional empathy which allows him to represent their power,
emotional richness, and inevitable weaknesses with a rare and
touching authenticity."
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