Wim Wenders to be awarded the 2023 Lumiere Award
The acclaimed German director Wim Wenders will be presented with the Lumiere Award at this year’s Lyon festival later in October. The week-long festival, which Cannes’ Thierry Fremaux spearheads, will celebrate both heritage cinema and modern filmmakers.
Wenders, a pioneering director of New German Cinema, is most well-known for his Cannes-winning Paris, Texas, his Peter Falk-starring Wings of Desire, and an eclectic list of highly esteemed documentaries, including the Oscar-nominated Buena Vista Social Club and Pina.
On the festival’s choice of Wenders as the recipient, Fremaux stated that it was “obvious”, praising him as a “voyaging director, a multi-faceted virtuoso and visionary, an accomplished photographer who has never ceased to reinvent himself and has lived a thousand lives”.
Started by Fremaux back in 2009 as a way to celebrate directors with a considerable body of work and acknowledge their contribution to cinema, the Lumiere Award has previously been awarded to Wong Kar-wai, Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood. 2022 saw the award given to Beetlejuice director Tim Burton, who most recently served as executive producer on Netflix’s Wednesday series, which he also directed four episodes of.
The Lyon festival will see Wenders returning to the city after over 30 years. He was last there in 1991, attending a retrospective of his film and photography work that the Lumiere Institute hosted. The festival, which runs from October 14th-22nd, will award Wenders the prize on the 20th.
Elsewhere at the festival will be a range of exciting new films, classics, and retrospectives of other master filmmakers’ work. Lyon Festival is most notable for its International Classic Film market, the only industry market reserved exclusively for classic film rights.
Following the reception of his Lumiere Award, Wenders will then travel to Japan, where he will lead the Jury for the Tokyo International Film Festival and host a retrospective of acclaimed Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Watch the trailer for Wenders’ upcoming Japanese film, Perfect Days, below.
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