The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has chosen writer-director Claire Denis as the recipient of this year’s Career Achievement Award.
LAFCA’s awards for the year’s best filmmaking achievements will be decided by members on Sunday, December 11, 2022. These winners will be honored alongside Denis at the organization’s first in-person awards event in three years, to be held on Saturday, January 11, 2022. 14, 2023.
“We are thrilled to honor Claire Denis, one of the finest living filmmakers and a master at portraying the identity crises faced by both the colonizer and the colonized,” said the president. from LAFCA, Claudia Puig. “A distinctive sociopolitical point of view and anti-patriarchal sensibility permeate his work, which is deeply evocative – often tender and intimate but never sentimental – and always uncompromising.”
This year, LAFCA will also introduce gender-neutral acting categories, with two awards for Best Lead Performance and two awards for Best Supporting Performance. Other award categories include Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Non-English Language Film, Best Documentary/Non-Fiction Film, Best Animation, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Design for Production, Best Music/Score, The New Generation, and the Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Award.
In the five decades since the start of her career with directors such as Jacques Rivette, Costa-Gavras and Wim Wenders, Claire Denis has been among the most daring and adventurous filmmakers in the world. Since its inception in 1988, Chocolateand continuing with movies like Good work (1999) and white material (2009), she was a particularly fearless chronicler of life in colonial and post-colonial Africa. But her mastery of the medium, exemplified by boldly elliptical storytelling and sensuous, tactile imagery, knows no geographic or thematic boundaries, whether it crosses metaphysical boundaries in the intruder (2004) or give a contemporary French touch to an Ozu classic in 35 shots of rum (2008).
Denis has made feature films that could be loosely classified as horror (problems every day2001), film noir (Bastards2013), romantic comedy (Let the sun in2017) and science fiction (high life, 2018). His numerous international festival awards include the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival for his drama NOTeclean and good (1996). And earlier this year, she won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Directing Award for Both sides of the blade and the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix for The stars at noon.
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association also continues to offer scholarships to aspiring film critics with the generous support of Rotten Tomatoes. Each year, the organization awards two $3,000 scholarships to recipients in the Los Angeles area: one to a woman and another to a person from one or more underrepresented groups.
