Director Liliana Cavani, along with actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai, will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale's 80th Venice International Film Festival, to be held from August 30 to September 9, 2023. The decision was made by the Biennale's Board of Directors, which endorsed the proposal of the director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera. "I am very happy and grateful to the Venice Biennale for this wonderful surprise," said, in accepting the proposal, Liliana Cavani, who has participated in the Venice Film Festival as early as 1965 with The Trial of Philippe Pétain, which won the Golden Lion for documentary, and then several times with Francis of Assisi (1966), Galileo (1968), The Cannibals (1969), among others, up to Ripley’s Game (2002) and Clarisse (2012). "One of the most emblematic protagonists of the new Italian cinema of the 1960s, with work that subsequently spans more than sixty years of entertainment history, Liliana Cavani is a versatile artist capable of frequenting television, theater and opera music with the same unconventional spirit and the same intellectual restlessness that have made her films famous," Barbera explained, "Hers has always been a nonconformist thought, free from ideological preconceptions and unencumbered by conditioning of any kind, moved by the urgency of the continual search for a truth hidden in the most remote and mysterious parts of the human soul, up to the borders of spirituality. The characters in her films are cast in a historical context that testifies to an existential tension toward change, young people seeking answers to important questions, complex and problematic subjects in whom the unresolved conflict between individual and society is reflected. Hers is a political gaze in the highest sense of the term, anti-dogmatic, non-aligned, courageous in confronting even the most challenging taboos, foreign to fashions, refractory to compromises and productive opportunisms, open instead to a fertile ambiguity towards the characters and situations staged. A fruitful lesson that is both aesthetic and ethical, from a protagonist of our cinema, defining its perennial modernity".