The British director, whose latest film ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’ will screen at this year's festival, will be honored with the “Heart of Sarajevo” award.
British director Stephen Frears will receive the “Heart of Sarajevo” award at next month's Sarajevo Film Festival.
The honorary award, given to those who have made “extraordinary contributions to the art of film, recognizes what the festival, based in the capital of Bosnia & Herzegovina, calls his “distinctive and provocative” work.
Frears, who studied law at Britain's Cambridge Universty before going on to to work in the theater and, later, as an assistant director to Karel Reisz on Morganand Lindsay Anderson on If, directed a raft of notable television plays in the 1970s before making his feature movie breakthrough with My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985. The low-budget feature, written by Hanif Kureishi and originally intended for TV, sold internationally and became a critical and commercial success.
The director had his Hollywood debut withDangerous Liaisons in 1989, scripted by fellow Brit Christopher Hampton, and went on to earn an Oscar nomination in 1991 forThe Grifters, produced by Martin Scorsese.
Frears, who was last in Sarajevo as a guest in 2002 when the festival devoted its tribute section to him, returned to British television in 2003 to direct political drama The Deal.
He directed Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins inMrs Henderson Presents and Helen Mirren inThe Queen, for which Mirren won an Oscar.
Recent films include four-time Oscar nominee Philomena; Tamara Drewe, an ironic look at English country life; Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight; and The Program, about disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong.
Frears’ latest film, Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant, will screen at this year's festival in its open-air program.
The 22nd edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 12-20.
