9 December 2024, European Film Awards, Lucerne, Switzerland
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
I wanted to say hello to Juliette and say how wonderful her speech was, but she's not here.
Wim, Agnieszka, I want to salute your great leadership of the European Academy.
Thank you.
I'm delighted to present the award for European Achievement in World Cinema.
Where to begin?
You may not know that the recipient of this award has produced a series of pornographic films. These are highly original films because they depict the sex lives and mating rituals of worms, bees, dragonflies, fireflies and snails.
They are made with humour and love and care and delight in how we all got here.
But to overemphasise these particular films would be to misrepresent this recipient, because she is, in fact, one of the great actors of our cinematic age.
She can claim a pretty decent heritage, but I can get to that in a minute.
But she stands in her own right as one of the great talents bequeathed us by the Italian cinema, and from there, making her way, her road, in world cinema, working alongside such extraordinary talents as the Taviani brothers, David Lynch, Robert Zemeckis, Peter Weir,Abel Ferrara, Guy Maddin, Denis Villeneuve, Alice Rohrwacher,
She's always looking, but with wisdom and with love and with an extraordinary sense of humour.
I've had the great good fortune to work with her recently on the film Conclave, where she returns to the role of a nun.
A nun, perhaps, with a core of steel and tenacity.
It was an extraordinary thing to witness the work of, and I might as well say it, Isabella, to witness her work close up, the lightness of touch, the ease, the circling of a take, and then landing in it with complete assurance.
Her voice is extraordinary.
It gently carries great levels of meaning and expression.
Her eyes carry worlds of meaning, but she allows the meaning to travel beyond her face to touch our hearts.
There is no acting. It is simply being. existing within the text and the moment that she has been given.
I think everyone who worked with her on Conclave felt this extraordinary magnetic flow, this current of expression, the perfect expression of an actor in front of a camera.
In a speech in Conclave, she gives us a masterclass in 45 seconds.
It's a crucial moment in the film. She delivers the lines with such ease and authority that we're blindsided by the impact. It's done with grace. She carries grace.
You all know who I'm talking about.
A great woman, a great artist, a great actor.
But before I present this award, let's take a glimpse at some of her work.