German director Werner Herzog will be honored with a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man director will be honored at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, which runs Aug. 27-Sept. 6.
“I feel deeply honored to receive a Lifetime Achievement Honorary Golden Lion by the Venice Biennale. I have always tried to be a Good Soldier of Cinema, and this feels like a medal for my work,” Herzog stated. “However, I have not gone into retirement. I work as always.”
The director, whose long list of credits as a director includes Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Signs of Life, Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: New Orleans, Nosferatu the Vampyre, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and as an actor turns in Jack Reacher and Disney+’s The Mandalorian, recently completed a new documentary, Ghost Elephants, is currently shooting a feature, Bucking Fastard, is working on an animated adaptation of his novel The Twilight World, and did a voice acting gig Bong Joon Ho’s upcoming animated film, The Valley.
Venice film festival director Alberto Barbera praised Herzog as one of the major innovators of New German Cinema. “Herzog has never ceased from testing the limits of film language, belying the traditional distinction between documentary and fiction,” Barbera noted. “A brilliant narrator of unusual stories, Herzog is also the last heir of the great tradition of German romanticism, a visionary humanist, and a tireless explorer.”
