Ricki and the Flash and the Venice Film Festival’s Visionary Award all in one year? You’re the man, Jonathan Demme!
The president of the Venice Horizons Jury, Jonathan Demme, was awarded the Persol Tribute to Visionary Talent Award yesterday at Sala Darsena before the screening of Renato De Maria’s Italian Gangsters. Demme, an Oscar-winning director will be remembered for films far less embarrassing than Ricki and the Flash (for instance, Silence of the Lambs).
“Jonathan Demme is part of that generation of cinephile auteurs who revolutionized Hollywood in the Seventies,” said Venice’s director Alberto Barbera. “Colorful, exuberant, straightforward, passionate and intelligent, his cinema moves easily from studio productions to independent, fiction and documentary films, indulging his personal taste for the unexpected, for a shift in tone or genre within each individual film, which has become the original and recognizable hallmark of his style”.
Demme was obviously very touched by honor, and thanked Barbera and the audience profusely.
I Love Italian Everything 