Director Pupi Avati will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award during the 70th edition of the David di Donatello Awards, the most prestigious honor in Italian cinema.  The prize will be awarded on Wednesday, May 7th. "The Academy of Italian Cinema is honored to present the David for Lifetime Achievement to Pupi Avati, a multifaceted talent as a director, writer, screenwriter, musician and producer, an unbreakable partnership with his brother Antonio," declared President and Artistic Director Piera Detassis. "An outstanding author and storyteller, he presented the lost time of the provinces, with their laziness, ferocities, and fears, the terrifying breath of monsters imagined as a boy in the countryside, but also the desire for redemption and the drive to chase dreams. Undisputed creator of the Po Valley Gothic with 'The House with Laughing Windows' up to his recent works 'Mr. Devil' and 'The American Backyard', Avati immerses himself magically into Emilian autobiography, lightly and unobtrusively probing the petit-bourgeois and rural unconscious, drawing signs of humanity from gray lives redeemed by poetry and hope, in a mosaic-like, collective storytelling of friendship and family, as happens in his many masterpieces".