The Venice Film Festival will honor iconoclastic German director Werner Herzog — whose body of work comprises “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo” and Nosferatu the Vampyre” — with its 2025 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
“I feel deeply honored to receive a Lifetime Achievement Honorary Golden Lion by the Venice Biennale,” Herzog said in a statement. “I have always tried to be a Good Soldier of Cinema, and this feels like a medal for my work: Thank you.”
“However,” Herzog went on to note, “I have not gone into retirement.”
“I work as always. A few weeks ago, I just finished a documentary in Africa, ‘Ghost Elephants,’ and at this moment, I am shooting my next feature film, ‘Bucking Fastard,’ in Ireland. I am developing an animated film, based on my novel, ‘The Twilight World,’ and I am acting the voice of a creature in Bong Joon Ho’s upcoming animated film. I am not done yet,” he added.
Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera called the director “a physical filmmaker and indefatigable hiker,” saying he “constantly crosses the planet Earth pursuing hitherto unseen images, testing our ability to look, challenging us to grasp what lies beyond the appearance of reality, and probing the limits of filmic representation in an unflagging search for a higher, ecstatic truth and new sensorial experiences. Establishing himself as one of the major innovators of New German Cinema with films such as “Signs of Life,” “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo,” “Bad Lieutenant,” “Port of Call: New Orleans” and “Grizzly Man.”
Barbera added: “He has never ceased from testing the limits of the film language, belying the traditional distinction between documentary and fiction, and at the same time proposing a radical investigation of the topics of communication, the relationship between images and music, and of the infinite beauty of nature and its inevitable corruption.”
Barbera said that Herzog is the “last heir of the great tradition of German romanticism” with a career that is “both fascinating and hazardous because it involves total commitment and putting oneself on the line to the point of physical risk, where catastrophe constantly lurks.”
The upcoming 82nd edition of Venice will run Aug. 27-Sept. 6.
