The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the 81st Venice International Film Festival has been awarded to the Australian director and screenwriter Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Master & Commander).
The decision was made by the board of la Biennale di Venezia, which embraced the proposal of the Festival’s Director, Alberto Barbera.
Peter Weir, in accepting, stated, “The Venice Film Festival and its Golden Lion are part of the folklore of our craft. To be singled out as a recipient for a lifetimes work as a director is a considerable honour.”
Regarding this award, Director Alberto Barbera declared, “With a total of only thirteen movies directed over the course of forty years, Peter Weir has secured a place in the firmament of the great directors of modern cinema. At the end of the 1970s, he made a name for himself as the main man behind the rebirth of Australian film thanks to two movies, The Cars That Ate Paris and Picnic at Hanging Rock, the latter of which gained cult film status over the years. The international success of his two next movies, Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously, opened Hollywood’s doors to him and he soon became one of its major protagonists.
In his films, Weir combines reflections on personal themes and a need to reach as vast an audience as possible. Despite the diversity of the topics he addresses, it is not difficult to discover a constant in his daring, rigorous, and spectacular film opus: a sensitivity that allows him to deal with highly up-to-date topics, such as a fascination with nature and its mysteries, the crisis of adults in consumerist societies, the difficulties of educating young people about life, the temptation of physical and cultural isolation, but also the lure of adventurous impulses and the instinct for rebellion. Celebrating a taste for storytelling and innate romanticism, Weir has reinforced his own role in the Hollywood establishment, all the while keeping his distance from the American movie industry. Witness, Mosquito Coast, Dead Poets Society, Fearless, The Truman Show, and Master & Commander are the major stages of an artistic career that has conserved its underlying integrity, all the way inside the commercial success of the movies he has made.
