Pedro Almodóvar at Film Society in June. Photo: Philip May
The European Film Academy will honor Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar with the European Achievement in World Cinema Award at the 26th European Film Awards slated for December 7 in Berlin, Germany.
The honor is in recognition of Almodóvar's “outstanding body of work,” according to the EFA website. Almodóvar burst on the Spanish film scene just as the country embraced its democracy in the 1980s. After a year and a half of eventful shooting on 16mm, in 1980 he opened Pepi, Luci, Bom, a no-budget film made with mostly beginner crew and the cast. In 1986, he founded the production company El Deseo S.A. with his brother Agustin. Their first project was Law of Desire.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker has been a Film Society mainstay since the '80s, when the filmmaker first brought What Have I Done to Deserve This? to New Directors/New Films in 1984. Since then, he's graced the New York Film Festival with films like Oscar winners Talk to Her (NYFF '02) and All About My Mother (NYFF '99).
“I am very thankful for this award. From its creation, the European Film Academy has been very generous with me and my closest collaborators,” said Almodóvar about the honor. “I share with them the joy of this award.”
He screened his latest film, I'm So Excited! at a Special Screening at Film Society of Lincoln Center in June, a film he said recalled his early work.
“I wanted to return to a genre that I was very familiar with in the 80s,” Almodóvar told FilmLinc in a pre-event conversation. “I wanted to make a comedy at the time I wrote the script. It's, of course, wonderful to hear people laughing and that it's casual.”
Pedro Almodóvar will be an honorary guest at the 26th European Film Awards Ceremony on 7 December 2013 in Berlin, streamed live on www.europeanfilmawards.eu.
