By Lise Pedersen, Elsa Keslassy
According To The variety The 2025 Lumière Film Festival reached its climax Friday night with the presentation of its top honor, the Lumière Award, to Michael Mann, celebrating the filmmaker of “Ali,” “Heat” and “The Insider.”
The ceremony kicked off with a surprise message from Quentin Tarantino, projected on the Amphithéâtre’s giant screen. “It seems we have a message from someone,” said Lumière festival director and Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux, introducing an email from Tarantino – one of the first Lumière Award laureates, honored back in 2013 – welcoming Mann “into the club.”
As he took to the stage to receive his award from the hands of 2024 laureate Isabelle Huppert, Mann was visibly moved. “Now I know why so many directors like Clint Eastwood and Tim Burton are speechless when they come up here. This is fantastic. Thank you so much.” He went on to recall the moment he decided to become a filmmaker: “The idea to make films entered my life when I was 19 or 20, on a cold and brilliantly clear winter night in Wisconsin after screening a silent film. I was walking downhill from the campus buildings and it was as if the skies parted, then a giant hand came down and said, you should direct films.”
He said it was “one of those rare moments in all of our lives when profound truth takes you over and there’s no negotiation, no second thinking, this is what you’ve got to do. And I’m profoundly fortunate to have found artistic work I feel so impelled to do throughout my lifetime.”
Mann closed his speech with gratitude: “I receive this wonderful honor with gratitude on behalf of the spirit we all share to make dramatic cinema – and also on behalf of that same imaginative spirit residing within every person here, to be impacted upon, transported by, and aroused by all that cinema does. Tonight will be an enduring memory for me. I am totally, profoundly grateful for this honor. Thank you very much.” Wiping away tears as he stood next to Huppert with his Lumiere Award, he thought of his father. He “was here in WW2 and fought the Battle of the Bulge. He loved France and everything French. If he could be here tonight it would be amazing,” Mann said.
Before handing over the award to Mann, Isabelle Huppert, last year’s laureate, paid homage to Mann, calling him “a filmmaker who listens to his actors, looks at them with curiosity, and offers them roles that both challenge and reveal them.”
“To receive the Prix Lumière here in Lyon is not only a reward, it’s a return to the source — to that original light of which you have become one of the great heirs,” she said. “Thank you, Michael Mann, for continuing to surprise us, to unsettle us, to share our obsessions, and for making cinema a place of tireless exploration, always renewed. Thank you for your demanding, lyrical, and sensual body of work, and for your fidelity to the light itself. May that light continue to be with you. And long live cinema.”
The celebration also showcased a richly layered montage of clips from Mann’s movies, a short film delving into the making of “Heat,” as well as a clip retrospective of cult classics and contemporary films that have marked 130 years of cinema history. Robert Redford and Diane Keaton, who passed away this year, were also remembered during the ceremony. A festival regular, French singer Camelia Jordana performed “We Shall Overcome” a capella and a song from Charles Aznavour.
Mann is the latest in a long list of American filmmakers honored at the Lumiere Festival, alongside Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton and Clint Eastwood. Introducing him on stage earlier today, Fremaux said Mann may not have won an Oscar, but “he’s here. He is in our lives. His films are here and we’ve been living with them for a number of years now. He’s one of those completely unpredictable filmmakers whose work is a series of bravura pieces.”
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