TAORMINA, Sicily – The Turin Film Festival will present its Grand Premio Torino lifetime achievement honor to director Ken Loach, while Italian counterpart and Cannes regular Paolo Sorrentino will head the festival’s international competition jury.
The 30-year-old Turin event will honor Loach and screenwriting collaborator Paul Laverty, and will host the Italian premier of The Angels’ Share, Loach’s comedy about a group of young unemployed Glaswegian workers who find salvation through single-malt Scotch whiskey. The film won the jury prize in Cannes this year.
Sorrentino, meanwhile, has his own Cannes connections. His last four feature-length films: Le Conseguenze dell’amore (The Consequences of Love) from 2004; 2006’s dark drama Amico di Familia (Friend of the Family); the epic biopic about Italian politician Giulio Andreotti Il Divo, which won the jury prize in Cannes in 2008; and This Must Be the Place from last year, Sorrentino’s first English-language drama, which starred Sean Penn as a retired rock star who sets out to get revenge on the man who humiliated his ex-Nazi father, won another jury award.
From that background, Sorrentino will head the main jury at the storied Turin festival, which will be headed again this year by artistic director and noted film director Gianni Amelio. The festival will take place this year Nov. 23-Dec. 1.
