The Lifetime Achievement Award was created in 2011 to salute film personalities with an extraordinary career. In the past years it was presented to film legends such as Harrison Ford (2011), Alain Delon (2012), Jacqueline Bisset (2013), Harvey Keitel (2016), Dario Argento (2021), and Matt Dillon (2022), Renzo Rossellini (2023), and in 2024 Alfonso Cuarón.
From low-budget films in Mexico to blockbusters in Hollywood and from adaptations like Great Expectations (1998), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and Children of Men (2006), to the audacity and delicacy of modern classics such as Y tu mamá también (2001), the Academy Award-winning Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018), Alfonso Cuarón has embodied the true spirit of a chameleonic contemporary artist able to master any assignment.
Though known for the dynamic long-takes that characterize the most memorable sequences in his films, Cuarón is also an exceptionally assured director of actors. He excels in eliciting iconic and often career-best performances from stars, ranging from those in Mexico, like Diego Luna or Gael García Bernal, to those abroad, such as Julianne Moore, George Clooney, Michael Caine, Clive Owen, and Sandra Bullock. All the while, he gives space to emerging talents, as he did most memorably with Yalitza Aparicio, a first-time actor whose performance in Roma earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
“Alfonso Cuarón is a visionary author of agile and liberated imaginaries. Combining an experimental spirit with the sweep of great popular writers, he has managed to capture the imagination and hearts of millions of viewers, passing on the same wonder that he himself experienced as a child and teenager basking in the glow of classic Mexican cinema. From coming-of-age novels to science fiction, from melodrama to grand sagas like Harry Potter, Alfonso Cuarón has reinvented himself as an artist with each new film, always in the service of the pleasure of cinema, and has thus created a truly multifaceted body of work.”
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director
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