Instagram
Film und Medien Stiftung NRWNewsNewsFilm Award Cologne for director Paolo Sorrentino at the 25th Cologne Conference

Film Award Cologne for director Paolo Sorrentino at the 25th Cologne Conference

  • Award ceremony on Thursday, 1 October, laudatory speech by director Tom Tykwer
  • German premiere of Sorrentino’s ¨Youth¨ on 25 September
  • 25th Cologne International Film & TV Festival from 25.09. – 01.10.2015

This year will see the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino receiving the prestigious Film Award Cologne which will be presented on Thursday, 1 October, during the 25th Cologne Conference.

Born in Naples in 1970, the film director and author became known in 2008 with his Cannes Jury Prize-winning film ¨Il Divo¨, a political satire about the Italian prime-minister Giulio Andreotti and his alleged Mafia connections. In 2010, Sorrentino directed his first English-language film, ¨This Must Be The Place¨, with Sean Penn as an ageing rock musician. He won four European Film Awards in 2013 for ¨La Grande Bellezza¨, including for Best European Film, and also picked up the Oscar and Golden Globe in 2014 in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. His latest work ¨Youth¨ is Sorrentino’s fifth film to be in competition at Cannes.

¨With Paolo Sorrentino, the Film Award Cologne is honouring one of the most important contemporary European directors.  Varied and evocatively narrated, his films are adept at marrying political and social analysis with magnificent images that linger long in the memory,¨ says Petra Müller, CEO of the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW.  ¨We are looking forward to Paolo Sorrentino andäre very happy that the film director Tom Tykwer will give the laudatory speech!

¨David Lynch, Francois Ozon, Lars von Trier and the Dardenne brothers; now in its ninth year as a collaboration with the Film- und Medienstiftung, the Film Award  Cologne honours those people who have made an outstanding contribution to the development of contemporary cinema. It is a great honour for the film city of Cologne that we may now recognise the Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino in this way,¨ says Cologne’s Lord Mayor Jürgen Roters.

¨There is hardly any European director who has received so many international awards in recent years like Paolo Sorrentino. We are very pleased to have him as our guest at the anniversary edition of the Cologne Conference. The presentation of the Film Award Cologne, the German premiere of his latest film ¨Youth¨ and a workshop discussion will give us the extraordinary opportunity to honour the director and his outstanding oeuvre,¨ says festival director Martina Richter.

The International Film & Television Festival will open on 25 September with the German premiere of his new film ¨Youth¨ – including Michael Caine and Jane Fonda in the leads – at Cologne’s Cinenova. A workshop discussion will be hosted on Thursday, October 1, by Domenico La Porta, Cineuropa, where Sorrentino will also speak about his new project, a TV series about a fictonal Italian-American Pope.

The Film Award Cologne is endowed with Euros 25,000 and presented by the City of Cologne and Film- und Medienstiftung NRW. The award ceremony will be held as the closing event of the Cologne Conference in Cologne’s Gürzenich. Last year saw the award going to the Danish director Lars von Trier.

The 25th edition of the Cologne Conference – from 25 September to 1 October, 2015 – will once again be showing the most important trends in international television and independent film culture