American director Todd Haynes will be honored by his French peers at this year’s Cannes film festival, receiving the lifetime achievement Carrosse d’Or award from the French Film Directors’ Guild.
The queer cinema pioneer, whose filmography includes Carol, Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There and May December, will receive the award on May 14 at the opening ceremony for Directors’ Fortnight, the Cannes festival sidebar organized by the guild.
“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,” the guild said of Haynes in a statement. “Your genius is to move and mesmerize us in a single move, combining formal virtuoso with infinite empathy and tenderness. Your films are a haven for anyone who knows the price they have paid for their feelings and their difference. You have 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.”
Haynes is becoming something of a fixture on the festival circuit. He was president of the international jury at this year’s Berlin film festival, where he gave the Golden Bear to Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s queer love story Dreams.
Haynes was deep into pre-production on his next feature, a gay romance set in the 1930s, when star Joaquin Phoenix suddenly pulled out, putting the project in limbo.
Previous winners of the Directors’ Fortnight Carrosse d’Or honor, which has been awarded since 2002, include Andrea Arnold, Kelly Reichardt, Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg, and Jane Campion.
