Curated playlist
Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement recipients
- Martin ScorseseMartin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports or join in games with the other children. So his parents and his older brother took him to the movies instead. That is where his passion for cinema began, in a child who could…
- Woody AllenWoody Allen has made 50 feature films. That single fact sits at the center of a career so long and so productive it resists easy summary. Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in the Bronx on the 30th of November 1935, he has written for film,…
- Al PacinoAl Pacino was born Alfredo James Pacino on the 25th of April 1940, in East Harlem, Manhattan, to Sicilian Italian-American parents. His father emigrated from San Fratello, his mother's family from Corleone. By the time he was two, his…
- Orson WellesOrson Welles was born on the 6th of May 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and died on the 10th of October 1985. In between those dates, he directed what is consistently ranked as one of the greatest films ever made, terrified radio listeners…
- Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a train wreck with his Lionel set. That eight-millimeter camera, borrowed from his…
- Charlie ChaplinCharlie Chaplin was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine. By 14, he had taken his own mother to an infirmary, watched her return to a mental asylum, and slept rough in the streets of London while searching for food. Within a…
- David LynchDavid Lynch was born on the 20th of January 1946 at St. Patrick's Hospital in Missoula, Montana, the son of a USDA research scientist and an English-language tutor. He died on the 16th of January 2025, four days before what would have been…
- Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was born on the 26th of July 1928 in the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, and he died on the 7th of March 1999, just a few days after hosting a private screening of his final film for his family and its stars. Between those…
- Hayao MiyazakiHayao Miyazaki was born on the 5th of January 1941 in Akebono-cho, Hongō, Tokyo City, the second of four sons in a family that manufactured rudders for fighter planes during World War II. His earliest memories are of bombed-out cities. At…
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski was born on the 18th of August 1933 in interbellum Paris, the child of two agnostics from very different worlds. His mother was raised Catholic despite having a Jewish father. His father was a Jewish painter and sculptor…
- Clint EastwoodClinton Eastwood Jr. entered the world at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco on the 31st of May, 1930, weighing 11 pounds 6 ounces. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him "Samson." Nobody in that delivery room could have…
- Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford Coppola illegally hired a grave robber to supply real human corpses as props, and oversaw the ritualistic killing of a water buffalo. This was the production of Apocalypse Now, a film so plagued by delays it earned the mocking…
- Ingmar BergmanAt the age of nine, Ingmar Bergman traded a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern. Within a year, the boy had built a private world he never wanted to leave. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes, and lighting effects. He staged…
- Akira KurosawaAkira Kurosawa directed 30 feature films across six decades, and yet the moment that first made the world notice him came about almost by accident. In 1951, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival went to a Japanese film that even its…
- Michelangelo AntonioniMichelangelo Antonioni died in Rome on the 30th of July 2007, the same day as Ingmar Bergman. Two titans of world cinema left on the same afternoon. Antonioni was 94 years old. His body lay in state at City Hall in Rome, where a large…
- John LasseterJohn Lasseter was fired from the Walt Disney Company for believing too hard in the future. The year was 1984, the project was a test film blending traditional hand-drawn animation with computer-generated backgrounds, and the men who fired…
- Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard once said: "A film consists of a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order." That line, delivered with the offhand certainty of someone who had spent decades dismantling the very idea of…
- Julie AndrewsJulie Andrews stood on a beer crate to reach the microphone. She was not yet ten years old, performing spontaneously in wartime variety shows alongside her mother and stepfather, singing solos or duets while her mother played piano. That…
- Robert BressonJean-Luc Godard once wrote of one man, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." The man Godard meant was Robert Bresson, a French filmmaker born on the 25th of September 1901 and dead on the…
- Éric RohmerÉric Rohmer wore a false moustache to the New York premiere of one of his films. The man who would be called "the most durable filmmaker of the French New Wave" by The Daily Telegraph was so committed to guarding his private life that he…