British director Terence Davies will receive the Gran Premio Torino lifetime achievement award at the upcoming 33rd Turin Film Festival.
Emerging in the ‘80s with the Terence Davies Trilogy (1983), the director went on to helm Distance Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992) and, more recently, Of Time and the City (2008) and The Deep Blue Sea (2011). Davies’ films paint portraits of members of the British middle class through a lens of deep sorrow and love.
“Eternally immersed in regret for his lost roots, Davies has created a personal style which brings together realism and poetic evocation; harsh dryness blends seamlessly with openings to imagination and collective song,” said the festival in a statement about his work.
Turin will screen Davies’ latest epic Sunset Song, based on the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbons, which follows a girl (Agyness Deyn) growing up with a violent father (Peter Mullan) in the year leading up to World War I in northeastern Scotland. The Hollywood Reporter called the film “visually stunning and emotionally engrossing” after its Toronto premiere this year. Magnolia will distribute the film in North America after acquiring the rights from Fortissimo Films.
This year’s Turin Film Festival runs from Nov. 20-28.
