Woo to receive career award
2009-12-21 17:59
Venice - Chinese director John Woo, whose highly choreographed action sequences have inspired US filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, is to receive the 2010 Venice Film Festival's career award, organisers announced on Monday.
The 63-year-old Woo was named the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 67th edition of the festival which is scheduled to run from September 1 - 11, 2010 in Venice.
"The acknowledgment recognises a filmmaker who in recent decades, with his revolutionary conception of staging and editing, has renewed action movies to the core, introducing an extreme stylization (close to visual art)," Venice Film Festival organisers said in a statement.
It cited Woo's Asian films such as A Better Tomorrow, 1987; The Killer, 1989; Bullett in the Head, 1990; Hard Boiled, 1991; and The Battle of Red Cliff of 2008, and his work in Hollywood, including Broken Arrow, 1996 Face/Off - starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage - in 1997 and Mission Impossible 2 in 2000.
"In his war and gangster film masterpieces, Woo has been capable of transfiguring hyperbolic motion (defying gravity) and exasperated violence with a highly original poetic and romantic infusion, sustained by an extremely personal and energetic figurative tension, similar to a surreal hallucination," the statement added.
Born in Guangzhou, China during the country's Civil War, Woo emigrated as a child with his family to Hong Kong where he began his cinema career in the 1970s. He has also worked as film producer and author of video games and graphic novels.
First held in 1932, the Venice Film Festival is the world's oldest film competition.
- SAPA