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The Leone d’Oro (English: Golden Lion) is the highest prize given to a film at the Biennale Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most distinguished prizes. In 1970, a second Golden Lion was introduced; this is an honorary award for people who have made an important contribution to cinema.
The prize was introduced in 1949 as the Golden Lion of St. Mark.1 Previously, the equivalent prize was the Gran Premio Internazionale di Venezia (Grand International Prize of Venice), awarded in 1947 and 1948. Before that, from 1934 until 1942, the highest awards were the Coppa Mussolini (Mussolini Cups) for Best Italian Film and Best Foreign Film.
No Golden Lions were awarded between 1969 and 1979. According to the Biennale's official website, this hiatus was a result of the 1968 Lion being awarded to the radically experimental Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos; the website says that the awards "still had a statute dating back to the fascist era and could not side-step the general political climate. Sixty-eight produced a dramatic fracture with the past."2
Grand International Prize of Venice
Golden Lion
Of note is that Golden Lion awards tend to be presented to European men. Since 1949 only a few women have ever won the Golden Lion for directing, Indian-born Mira Nair, German Margarethe von Trotta and Belgium's Agnès Varda, who both won more than two decades ago. Although numerous Americans have won honorary awards at the festival, Americans have only won the Golden Lion three times, with awards for John Cassavetes and Robert Altman (both times the awards were shared with other winners who tied), and Darren Aronofsky (the first sole American to win the award)
Golden Lion – Honorary Award
| Year |
Winner(s) |
| 1970 |
Orson Welles |
| 1971 |
Ingmar Bergman, Marcel Carné, Charles Aznavour and John Ford |
| 1972 |
Charles Chaplin, Anatoly Golovnya and Billy Wilder |
| 1982 |
Alessandro Blasetti, Luis Buñuel, Frank Capra, George Cukor,
Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Yutkevich, Alexander Kluge, Akira Kurosawa,
Michael Powell, Satyajit Ray, King Vidor and Cesare Zavattini |
| 1983 |
Michelangelo Antonioni |
| 1985 |
Manoel de Oliveira, John Huston and Federico Fellini |
| 1986 |
Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani |
| 1987 |
Luigi Comencini and Joseph L. Mankiewicz |
| 1988 |
Joris Ivens |
| 1989 |
Robert Bresson |
| 1990 |
Marcello Mastroianni and Miklos Jancso |
| 1991 |
Mario Monicelli and Gian Maria Volonté |
| 1992 |
Jeanne Moreau, Francis Ford Coppola and Paolo Villaggio |
| 1993 |
Steven Spielberg, Robert De Niro, Roman Polanski and Claudia Cardinale |
| 1994 |
Al Pacino, Suso Cecchi d'Amico and Ken Loach |
| 1995 |
Woody Allen, Monica Vitti, Martin Scorsese, Alberto Sordi,
Ennio Morricone, Giuseppe de Santis, Goffredo Lombardo and Alain Resnais |
| 1996 |
Robert Altman, Vittorio Gassman, Dustin Hoffman and Michele Morgan |
| 1997 |
Gerard Depardieu, Stanley Kubrick and Alida Valli |
| 1998 |
Warren Beatty, Sophia Loren and Andrzej Wajda |
| 1999 |
Jerry Lewis |
| 2000 |
Clint Eastwood and Éric Rohmer |
| 2002 |
Dino Risi |
| 2003 |
Dino De Laurentiis and Omar Sharif |
| 2004 |
Stanley Donen and Manoel de Oliveira |
| 2005 |
Hayao Miyazaki and Stefania Sandrelli |
| 2006 |
David Lynch |
| 2007 |
Tim Burton |
| 2008 |
Ermanno Olmi |
See also
References
External links
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