Francis Ford Coppola will receive the honorary Lumiere Award at the upcoming Lumiere festival, which celebrates heritage movies and film masters every year in Lyon, France.
Previous recipients of the Lumiere Award include Jane Fonda, Wong Kar-Wai, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodovar, Clint Eastwood and Quentin Tarantino.
The Lumiere Festival, launched by Cannes Film Festival’s artistic director Thierry Fremaux, and filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier from the Institut Lumière, will take place Oct. 12-20 in Lyon.
As part of the tribute to Coppola, “The Godfather” trilogy will be screened through the night. As he unveiled the lineup inside the packed auditorium of the Institut Lumière, Fremaux described Coppola as a “cinema giant” and a pioneer who dared to venture off the beaten path throughout his career with movies like “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.”
After hosting Alfonso Cuaron with “Roma” last year, the Lumiere festival this year will welcome South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho with his Palme d’Or-winning movie “Parasite,” which is already a B.O. hit in its home market and also in France, where it’s already sold over 330,000 tickets. “‘Parasite’ is on track to become the highest-grossing Palme d’Or-winning movie ever,” Fremaux said.
Related
Other high-profile guests expected at the Lumiere festival include veteran French actor Daniel Auteuil, who will attend the sneak premiere of Nicolas Bedos’ “La Belle Epoque,” which played out of competition at Cannes. The Lumiere festival will also welcome Ken Loach with his latest movie “Sorry We Missed You,” which competed at Cannes, as well as the cult actress-turned-novelist Marina Vlady, whose credits include the Golden Globe-nominated film “The Conjugal Bed.” Loach will give a masterclass during the festival.
Fremaux unveiled plans to host a retrospective of André Cayatte’s work. A former lawyer who became a filmmaker and novelist in the 1950s, Cayatte directed “Before the Deluge,” “Are We All Murderers” and “Retour à la Vie.”
Another retrospective, titled Forbidden Hollywood, the Warner Years, will turn the spotlight on U.S. movies made by the studio between 1930 and 1934 before the Motion Picture Production Code took effect. The code, created by Will H. Haze, set industry moral guidelines in movies. “The Lumiere festival aims to explore our film heritage in order to gain insight on today’s film culture,” said Fremaux after reading some excerpt of the Haze code.
Following this edition of Cannes where many movies – including Jim Jarmusch’s opening night pic “The Dead Don’t Die,” showcased zombies — the Lumiere festival will celebrate George A. Romero with the exclusive premiere of the restored version of his “Night of the Living Dead” trilogy.