Thierry Frémaux Talks Bringing Classic Cinema Back To Life At The Lumière Film Festival & Nobel Prize Inspiration For Its Honorary Lumière Prize
23.10.2023 - 13:57
/ deadline.com
Thierry Frémaux is best known internationally as the long-time head of France’s Cannes Film Festival, which is organized out of its offices in Paris’s trendy Marais neighborhood.
The double-hatted cinema expert is perhaps more in his element in his home city of Lyon, where he is the director of the Institut Lumière, situated on the site of the former mansion and factory of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
Alongside its late co-founders Bernard Chardère and Bertrand Tavernier, Frémaux has been a driving force behind the expansion of the institute and its activities, including the creation of its classic cinema-focused Lumière Film Festival, which has just wrapped its 15th edition.
Highlights this year included German director Wim Wenders receiving its prestigious Lumière Prize, following in the footsteps of the likes of Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Francis Ford Coppola. As part of the honor, the Paris, Texas filmmaker also got to shoot his version of the 1895 Lumière film Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory.
Wim Wenders directing his version of Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory
As per the festival’s format, the line-up mixed new restorations of films such as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name Of The Rose and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys; cinema concerts celebrating Disney’s 100th anniversary and Tavernier; an homage to the late Jane Birkin; photo exhibitions around Wenders’ work, and previews of upcoming releases including Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy And The Heron and Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon.
Other official guests included Wes Anderson, Marisa Paredes, Alexander Payne, Karin Viard, Taylor Hackford, Rintaro, Alfonso Cuaron, Michel Hazanavicius, J.A. Bayona, Alice Rohrwacher, Tran Anh