Come to Lyon, “it’s like coming to Bethlehem, where the films were created by the Lumière Brothers, they probably had wives and assistants and I greet them“, she launched after receiving the price that its promoters like to compare to “Nobel for cinema”.
After several years of silence, the 67-year-old filmmaker presented her seventh feature film this year, The Power of the Dog, produced by the American platform Netflix and crowned in Venice with the prize for the best realization. “The power of the dog“is an adaptation of the eponymous novel by American writer Thomas Savage. Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst break the codes of the manly western.
The festival which opened last Saturday and ends Sunday allowed moviegoers to see or re-watch his six other feature films, including The Piano Lesson, which won him the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1993 and then the Oscar for best screenplay.
The 13th edition offers a total of nearly 170 films and documentaries, many great classics in restored version but also some previews, with a series of meetings with headliners of contemporary cinema such as the Italian Paolo Sorrentino.
Present at the ceremony on Friday, the legendary Nan Goldin, 68, inaugurated this week an exhibition of her set photographs of Variety. In this film signed by her friend Bette Gordon, where she plays what she was then, a disillusioned barmaid in a Manhattan bar, at the time when “New York was a small world where you could meet people” and “not a market“.
In the past, the Lumière Award has honored Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Fonda, Wong Kar-wai, Catherine Deneuve, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, Quentin Tarantino, Ken Loach, Gérard Depardieu, Milos Forman, Clint Eastwood and, last year , the Dardenne brothers.
According to the organizers, celebrating Jane Campion was “one of Bertrand Tavernier’s last wishes“, figure of French cinema who chaired the Institut Lumière from its creation in 1982 until his death last March. He is now replaced by actress Irène Jacob as president of the festival.
The attendance of the 2021 vintage “nearing 2019 records“which had reached 200,000 spectators before the great hollow linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to official figures.
