AwardsWatch

This year’s Stockholms Lifetime Achievement Award goes to the Acadamy Award-winning actress and Hollywood legend Vanessa Redgrave. In connection to the screening of her debute as a director with the documentary Sea Sorrow, the actress will tonight visit Stockholm International Film Festival to receive the Bronze Horse.

Motivation: This year’s winner of the Stockholm Lifetime Achievement Award has been one of the most prominent actors in the world for over five decades and has been named ”the greatest living actress of our time” by Tennesse Williams. She is as brilliant in costume dramas and political documentaries as she is in works of some of the greatest auteurs in cinematic history. With astonishing force and great social commitment, Vanessa Redgrave has made acting her life’s work.

Redgrave has an impressive career with over a hundred movies, reaching over five decades, behind her. But now she is changing path and makes her debute as a director with the documentary Sea Sorrow. The film will also be screened at the Stockholm Film Festival.

Vanessa Redgrave is famous for her part in the movie Blow Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonionis. Other roles include Murder On The Orient Express (1974), Julia (1977), for which she won an Acadamy Award for best female supporting actress, and Mission: Impossible (1996). Vanessa Redgrave is also one of few who has been awarded both an Acadamy Award, a Tony and an Emmy.

She is also known for her involvement in politics throughout her career. During the Vietnam war she was an outspoken opponent and in her Acadamy Award speech in 1977 she drew great media attention to herself for openly criticising Israel.

This political involvement becomes even clearer in her touching debute as a director with Sea Sorrow. The documentary is a strong tale about migration, the refugee crisis and war, where Redgraves own experiences from the second world war is combined with reflections about todays global influx of migrants.

The film is a powerful outreach for humanism in a time of national tendencys and corresponds with this years festival theme – Change.

The Stockholm Lifetime Achievement Award is presented annually to honor and acknowledge a longstanding career and an outstanding achievement in cinema. The prestigious award, in the shape of a 7,3kg (16 lb) Bronze Horse is the heaviest film award in the world. It is also a paraphrase on a national design icon, the Swedish Dala horse, and was created by artist Fredrik Swärd. The prize has previously been awarded to directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Quentin Tarantino, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Oliver Stone and Mike Leigh.