The Other Side of the Wind editor Bob Murawski will be honored with the first-ever Campari Passion for Film Award at the 75th annual Venice Film Festival.
The award promotes the extraordinary contribution made by a director’s closest collaborators to the artistic vision of a film, according to festival organizers. The Passion for Film Award pays tribute to directors of photography, editors, composers, production designers, and costume designers whose efforts are often decisive to the quality of a movie, but seldom acknowledged at major film festivals.
Venice Film Festival Director Alberto Barbera noted Murawski’s contribution to the “masterful reconstruction of Orson Welles’ unfinished movie, The Other Side of the Wind,” a Netfilx offering that will have its world premiere at the festival on August 31.
“The first edition of the Campari Passion for Film Award, which promotes the contribution made by the director’s closest collaborators to the artistic vision of each film, could only go to Bob Murawski,” Barbera said.
He lauded Murawski for his “ability to establish a creative relationship with numerous directors, right as filming begins, as with Sam Raimi; his passion for genre cinema, which inspired him to cofound a company which restores and distributes cult movies, above all horror films; a work method which permits him to successfully sort out hundreds of hours of footage, as in the case of The Hurt Locker by Kathryn Bigelow, for which he received an Oscar; and finally, his incredible work on an enormous quantity of 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm film which gave rise to the masterful reconstruction of Orson Welles’ unfinished movie, The Other Side of the Wind.”
“All this is confirmation of the extraordinary talent of Murawski, a brilliant film editor whose work has become the manifestation of his authentic and original creative talent,” Barbera added.
Murawski will receive his honor when The Other Side of the Wind premieres on August 31 at Venice Lido’s historic Sala Grande.
Using Welles’ notes, scripts and a partial workprint, Murawski pieced together a 122-minute cinematic jigsaw puzzle from the 1,083 reels of film shot by the late director over a nearly 5 1/2 year span during the 1970s.
Murawski and his co-editor and wife Chris Innis won the Academy Award for editing the 2009 Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker.
For many, he is best known for his longtime collaboration with Raimi on Army of Darkness, Oz the Great and Powerful and the blockbuster Spider-Man trilogy.
Outside the editing room, Murawski runs Grindhouse Releasing, a distributor dedicated to the restoration and preservation of classic cult films.
Founded in 1996, Grindhouse has produced critically acclaimed deluxe edition DVDs and Blu-rays of such films as the notorious Cannibal Holocaust, Lucio Fulci’s Italian horror masterpiece The Beyond, and Burt Lancaster ‘s The Swimmer, which was awarded the Best Blu-ray of 2014 by the International Press Academy. Grindhouse presented the theatrical release of Duke Mitchell’s previously unfinished 1976 crime saga Gone With the Pope.
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