For the 50th edition, the “Laceno d’Oro” Lifetime Achievement Award has been bestowed on the cinema master Víctor Erice – The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur, Close Your Eyes – a cult filmmaker revered by cinephiles around the world.
Celebrated documentarian Andrei Ujică – TWST / Things We Said Today, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Out of the Present, Videograms of a Revolution – one of the most innovative authors working with found footage, will receive the “Pier Paolo Pasolini” Honorary Award and will serve as President of the International Feature Film Jury.
There will be a retrospective for both filmmakers: Laceno audiences will be able to attend screenings of Víctor Erice such as Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes), his most recent masterpiece, El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), El Sur, El sol del membrillo (The Sun of the Quince), and several of his short films mostly previously unreleased. Andrei Ujică’s program includes: Videograms of a Revolution co-directed with Harun Farocki, Out of the Present, 2 Pasolini, Unknown Quantity, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, a cinema masterpiece an essential film on the 20th Century history, TWST / Things We Said Today.
Víctor Erice and Andrei Ujică will both hold public masterclasses, sharing their visions and revisiting their careers.
Víctor Erice (Biography)
Víctor Erice Aras (born 1940 in Karrantza, Biscay, Basque Country) is a Spanish film director. He studied law, political science, and economics at the University of Madrid. In 1963 he also attended the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografia to study film directing.
A former critic for the Spanish film magazine Nuestro Cine, he directed several short films before his first feature, El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, 1973), a critical portrait of the 1940s rural Spain. The film was screened at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes and won the Concha de Oro at the San Sebastián Film Festival.
Ten years later, Erice wrote and directed El Sur (1983), based on a story by Adelaida García Morales, selected for Cannes Film Festival. His third movie, El sol del membrillo (1992), a documentary about painter Antonio López García, received both the Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
He was a member of Cannes Jury Film in 2010.
At the Locarno Film Festival 2014, Erice received a Pardo D’Onore for lifetime achievement
His last masterpiece, Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2023.
Víctor Erice is considered an inspirational figure for many young filmmakers and a reference point for movie lovers around the world.
Andrei Ujică (Biography)
Andrei Ujică (born 1951 in Timișoara, Romania) is a Romanian screenwriter and filmmaker.
He studied literature in Timișoara, Bucharest, and Heidelberg. In 1990 he began making films. Shortly after the end of the Cold War, he and Harun Farocki co-directed Videograms of a Revolution, a seminal work about the relationships between political power and the media, ranked by Cahiers du Cinéma among the 10 most subversive films of all time.
His subsequent work, Out of the Present, focuses on the cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov who spent 10 months aboard the Mir space station while the USSR collapsed. The film has been compared to classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris and is considered one of the cult non-fiction films of the 1990s.
His masterpiece, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010) is the final chapter of a trilogy on the end of communism, invited to the Cannes Film Festival.
His 2005 project, Unknown Quantity, creates a fictional dialogue between Paul Virilio and Svetlana Alexievich, author of Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future, exploring the consequences of the nuclear disaster.
In 2001, Ujică became a film professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. He is the director of the ZKM Film Institute, which he founded in 2002. His latest film, TWST / Things We Said Today was screened in the Orizzonti section at Venice Film Festival 2024.