Joel and Ethan Coen will be honored at the 18th Lumière Festival, which will be held from October 10th to 18th in Lyon, France.
The filmmaker brothers will receive the Lumière Award at the festival, which focuses on classic films and iconic filmmakers and is directed by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux.
The Coens will be presented with the award on Oct. 16, and their films will be screened in a retrospective along with a series of event screenings.
The Lumière Prize is awarded to “a person in the world of cinema for his or her entire body of work.” Last year, Michael Mann was the recipient of the award. Other winners include Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodovar, Quentin Tarantino, Jane Fonda and Clint Eastwood.
The brothers’ Oscar wins include “No Country for Old Men” and “Fargo.” Nominations include “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” “True Grit,” “A Serious Man” and “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?”
“The adjective ‘cult’ seems to have been coined for them,” the festival said in a statement. “They have won one Palme d’Or, three Best Directors, one Grand Prix and four Oscars at the Cannes Film Festival, but it is above all the public’s enthusiasm, the audience’s attachment to their films and their influence on contemporary culture that has elevated them to the pinnacle of cinema superstardom.”
He added that they are “extraordinary storytellers and excellent playwrights” and praised “their sense of humor, their style, their storytelling, their use of music, and the ensemble of actors that surround them.”
The magazine called them “rock stars of the arts, icons of popular culture whose films have left an indelible impact,” adding, “They are at the forefront of the generation that revolutionized the art of film in the 1990s.”
They concluded that he was “a worthy inheritor of the great tradition of American cinema, and one of its finest successors.”
