WERNER HERZOG

The visionary of New German Cinema celebrated this evening at the Lido

This evening, Wednesday, August 27, the Venice Film Festival will award Werner Herzog the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The award will be presented in the Sala Grande during the opening ceremony, shortly before the screening of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia . It’s a striking choice: two moments of this magnitude, concentrated in the same space, almost risk drawing attention away from each other. But Venice is also this: a precarious balance, made of coincidences and contrasts, that brings it to life.

Herzog, born in Munich in 1942, began making films at nineteen, after a childhood spent far away in a Bavarian valley. Since then, he has never stopped: around seventy films, including fiction and documentaries, plays and operas, books of prose and poetry, installations, and even acting roles, from the big screen with Jack Reacher to global series like The Mandalorian . Always on the move, always searching for new languages.

His cinema has the face of obsession: from Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Fitzcarraldo , where he actually had a ship dragged up a mountain in the jungle, to Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams . Each time he pushed filmic language to the limit, erasing the boundaries between documentary and fiction, challenging himself and those who worked with him.

Accepting the award, Herzog struck a humble tone: “I am deeply honored. I have tried to be a good soldier of cinema, and this feels like a medal for my work. But I’m not finished yet; I continue to work .” Indeed, his ongoing projects confirm this: a documentary recently shot in Africa, a new film in Ireland, an animation based on his novel The Twilight World , and even a character in Bong Joon-ho’s next film.

What Venice celebrates today is not just a director. He is an explorer of the imagination, capable of transforming physical toil into poetic vision. A man who continues to tirelessly search for that “landscape of the soul” that has always been central to his work.

GALLERY