Director Todd Haynes has been announced as the recipient of this year’s Golden Coach Award at the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors Fortnight. Presented by the Society of French Directors (SFR), the honorary award recognizes outstanding contributions to cinema. Haynes will be honored during a special ceremony on May 14th in Cannes.
“From ‘Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story to Safe,’ ‘Velvet Goldmine,’ ‘Carol‘ and ‘May December,’ your films have been inhabited by a great faith in cinema’s experimental and narrative possibilities,” said the SRF in a letter signed by its members, including Julie Bertuccelli, Romain Cogitore, Cédric Klapisch and Zoé Wittock. The organization praised Haynes for his “genius to move and mesmerize us in a single move, combining formal virtuoso with infinite empathy and tenderness.”
The letter states that Haynes has been “relentlessly shaking up the norms and structures of cinematic representation in order to better question our social, racial, and gender representations; as if all the love and violence in the world came together in your cinema to carry us away in a flood of emotion.”
Past recipients of the Golden Coach Award include Andrea Arnold, Souleymane Cissé, Kelly Reichardt, Frederick Wiseman, Martin Scorsese, and Werner Herzog. Under the leadership of Julien Rejl, Cannes’ Directors Fortnight introduced its first audience award last year in collaboration with the Chantal Akerman Foundation. Earlier this year, Haynes served as the jury president at the Berlin Film Festival, where the Golden Bear Award was given to “Dreams (Sex Love)” directed by Dag Johan Haugerud. He was also embroiled in a dispute
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Photo Credit Charley Gallay
