Germany’s iconic director Werner Herzog will be awarded a Carrosse d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The award comes from France’s Société des réalisateurs de films (SFR), organisers of the Quanzaine des réalisateurs/Directors’ Fortnight during the festival.
In the guild’s statement, they salute Herzog’s “relentless energy and great creativity… juggling between formats and production systems, abolishing the borders between fiction and documentary, cinema and television, reason and madness.”
“Even Herzog’s failures are spectacular”
No one is going to dispute that. Critic Roger Ebert once said of him, that he “has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.” From the quasi-apocalyptic shooting of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” to “Nosferatu the Vampyre” and the epic “Fitzcarraldo”, his films explore the extreme.
This will be Herzog’s third award at Cannes, as “Fitzcarraldo” (based on a real character) won a Palme d’Or and Herzog won the Best Director award in 1982.
The members of the SFR include directors Luc BATTISTON, Guillaume BRAC, Stéphane BRIZÉ, Thomas CAILLEY, Malik CHIBANE, Catherine CORSINI, Alice DIOP, François FARELLACCI, Philippe FAUCON, Léa FEHNER, Pascale FERRAN, Denis GHEERBRANT, Thomas JENKOE, Cédric KLAPISCH, Thomas LILTI, Paul MARQUES DUARTE, Jonathan MILLET, Anne NOVION, Katell QUILLÉVÉRÉ, Aude Léa RAPIN, Christophe RUGGIA, Céline SCIAMMA and Rebecca ZLOTOWSKI.