VENICE: Globetrotting filmmaker Werner Herzog, an eclectic risk-taker whose monumental works often explore humankind’s conflict with nature, was honored with a special award on Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival.
The 82-year-old arthouse giant, who helped launch New German Cinema in the 1960s, received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement ahead of the debut of his latest documentary, “Ghost Elephants,” about a lost herd in Angola, on Thursday.
He was handed a special winged Golden Lion statue by “The Godfather” director and friend Francis Ford Coppola who praised the German’s “limitless creativity.”
“I have always tried to strive for something that goes deeper beyond what you normally see in movie theaters, a deep form of poetry that is possible in cinema,” Herzog told a star-studded audience in an acceptance speech.
Guided by a search “for truth in unusual ways,” he added: “I always try to do something which was sublime, or something transcendental.”
