The Hungarian director will present her latest film, The Story of My Wife, starring Léa Seydoux and Louis Garrel, at the festival.
Winner of the Camera d'Or at Cannes and the Golden Bear at Berlin, the filmmaker will receive recognition for her career on November 5th.
Seville, 28 October 2021 - The Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi will receive the Seville Festival's Honorary Award, a new distinction with which the event wishes to recognise filmmakers with a distinctive body of work, who constitute the living history of European cinema. The director will receive the award at the opening gala on November 5th at the Lope de Vega Theatre, and the following day her new film, The Story of My Wife, a romantic drama starring Léa Seydoux, Gijs Naber and Louis Garrel, will be presented at the same venue. The film adapts the novel published by Milan Füst in 1942, which tells the story of the romance between a ship captain and a mysterious woman.
In 2018, the Seville European Film Festival dedicated a retrospective to Enyedi as a tribute to her extensive filmography, which began with The Mole (1987), a first feature film deriving from her most experimental period at the Béla Balázs Studio, the only independent film studio in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Wall. Prior to this debut, Enyedi had been a member of the underground art collective Indigo, cultivating conceptual and performance art.
Shortly afterwards, she won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with My 20th Century (1989). She continued to travel to festivals and win awards with Magic Hunter (1994), Tamás and Juli (1997) and Simon Magus (1999). She then entered a long period without directing any more feature films, in which several projects she had worked on fell through, and during which she barely completed one part of the film project Európából Európába (From Europe to Europe), celebrating Hungary's entry into the European Union, adapting the Hungarian version of the series Terápia for HBO.
Teaching at the Budapest Faculty of Theatre and Film since the late 1980s, it took Enyedi 18 years before she returned to directing a feature film: On Body and Soul (2017) won the Golden Bear and the FIPRESCI award in Berlin. A comeback that she is now extending with the film that the Seville Festival is premiering in our country, The Story of My Wife, which had its world premiere in the Official Section in Cannes.
