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Homage to a master of New Wave Cinema

One of film-making’s true visionaries and virtuoso in the use of language, Jean-Luc Godard has inspired and continues to inspire generations of film directors around the world. Now aged 84, and with around 100 works to his name, the French-Swiss artist is the recipient of the 2015 Swiss Film Honorary Award.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930 to Swiss parents and studied ethnology at the Sorbonne. After having worked as a film critic, he made his first short film on the construction of the Grande Dixence Dam in Switzerland in 1955.  In 1960 he burst onto the international stage with his first full-length feature “Breathless”, (“À bout de souffle”). The film, which stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, came to be considered a seminal masterpiece of the emerging Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement. The rebellious and experimental filmmaker has produced around 100 works – many of which have influenced cinematic history – during his 50-year-career. His subversion of traditional narrative structures, however, has sometimes challenged the cinema-going public, which since the 1980s has increasingly stayed away from his films, judging them to be too complex.

His most recent film “Adieu au langage”, (“Goodbye to Language”), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 and went on to win the Jury Prize.

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