Veteran director, writer, producer and actor Werner Herzog will receive a Donostia Award in recognition of his career during the opening gala of the San Sebastián Festival (18 to 26 September).
The festival’s highest honorary distinction for the German filmmaker will be accompanied by a screening of his new feature, Bucking Fastard, which will launch at the upcoming Venice Film Festival.
The Donostia Award Screening will take place at the Victoria Eugenia Theatre prior to the award ceremony at the Kursaal. The new movie stars Rooney Mara, Kate Mara, Orlando Bloom and Domhnall Gleeson in the story of twin sisters “whose close bond leads them to speak in unison, love the same man and share the same dreams”.
Over a career spanning six decades, Herzog has become one of the most influential figures in international cinema, working on around 80 films often alighting on the subjects of obsession, extreme situations and the contradictions of human nature. Guided by his concept of “ecstatic truth”, Herzog has advocated a cinema that transcends the mere observation of facts to reveal a deeper, more poetic dimension of reality.
Born in Munich in 1942, he grew up as a child in a remote valley in the Bavarian mountains. Until age 11, he did not even know of the existence of cinema. He started to develop film projects from age 15 on, and since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory during the last years of high school. He also started to travel on foot.
He made his first phone call at age 17 and his first film at 19. He dropped out of college where he studied history and literature.
Since then he has written, produced and directed some 80 films. They include the classics Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972); Fitzcarraldo (1982), for which he moved a steamship over a mountain in the jungle; Grizzly Man (2005) and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). He has published poetry and books of prose and acted in films, among them Jack Reacher, The Mandalorian and guest roles in The Simpsons.
