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Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen will receive this year’s Cologne Film Prize in honor of his life’s work.
The British director and Turner-winning visual artist, won the Academy Award for best picture for his 2013 drama 12 Years a Slave. More recently, McQueen has focused on the small screen, with his Emmy-nominated miniseries Small Axe, a series of films focused on London’s Afro-Caribbean community, and the Amazon documentary series Uprising.
The Cologne Film Prize, which comes with a $30,000 (€25,000) cash bursary, honors filmmakers who “have made an outstanding contribution to the further development of film and media language.” Previous winners include David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Jane Campion and Paolo Sorrentino. McQueen will receive his prize at a gala event in Cologne on Oct. 28 that will close the 31st Cologne Film Festival.
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The festival, which runs Oct. 21-28, will also screen a retrospective of McQueen’s work, including 12 Years a Slave; his first two features, Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011); and the 2018 crime drama Widows.
French director Gaspar Noe will also be honored at this year’s Cologne Film Festival with The Hollywood Reporter Award. The enfant terrible of European cinema (Irreversible, Enter the Void), shocked even his hardcore fans with his latest drama, Vortex, an emotional and surprisingly heartfelt drama about love and death, told using a split-screen technique.
Lover’s Rock, part of McQueen’s Small Axe series, will also screen in competition at this year’s festival, in the Top 10 TV section. Other small-screen highlights include the RTL miniseries Faking Hitler, about the 1980s scandal involving fake documents claimed to be the authentic diaries of Adolf Hitler; Andrew Haigh’s BBC survival drama The North Water; and Furia, a Norwegian-German series about an undercover police officer who infiltrates a group of far-right extremists.
On the feature film side, the 2021 Cologne Festival will screen some of the highlights of this year’s festival season, including Noe’s Vortex, Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, Valdimar Johansson’s Icelandic drama Lamb and Andrea Arnold’s animal rights documentary Cow, all of which premiered in Cannes.
The Hollywood Reporter is the international media partner of the Cologne Film Festival.
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