Todd Haynes will receive the Golden Coach Award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival‘s Directors Fortnight.
The honorary award is handed out by the governing body of the Cannes sidebar, the Society of French Directors (SFR). The ceremony paying tribute to Haynes will take place on May 14 in Cannes.
“From ‘Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story to Safe,’ ‘Velvet Goldmine,’ ‘Carol’ and ‘May December,’ your films have been inhabited by a great faith in cinema’s experimental and narrative possibilities,” said the SRF in a letter signed by its members, including Julie Bertuccelli, Romain Cogitore, Cédric Klapisch and Zoé Wittock. The org praised Haynes for its “genius to move and mesmerize us in a single move, combining formal virtuoso with infinite empathy and tenderness.”
Haynes has been “relentlessly shaking up the norms and structures of cinematic representation in order to better question our social, racial and gender representations; as if all the love and violence in the world came together in your cinema to carry us away in a flood of emotion,” reads the letter.
Previous recipients of the Golden Coach Award include Andrea Arnold, Souleymane Cissé, Kelly Reichardt, Frederick Wiseman, Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog.
Earlier this year, Haynes presided over the jury of the Berlin Film Festival whose Golden Bear Award went to “Dreams (Sex Love)” by Dag Johan Haugerud.
Now spearheaded by Julien Rejl, Cannes’ Directors Fortnight launched its first audience award last year in partnership with the Chantal Akerman Foundation.
