The Venice International Film Festival will award American film editor Bob Murawski with the Campari Passion for Film award.
The award promotes the extraordinary contribution made by the director’s closest collaborators to the artistic vision of each film. Only occasionally do the contributions of directors of photography, editors, composers, production designers, and costume designers receive proper recognition for their work, which is often decisive to the quality of the final result.
Passion for Film awards each of these figures in turn, not just as artisans, but as artists and co-authors of the works to which they dedicate their invaluable talent.
The awards ceremony for Bob Murawski will take place on 31 August before the out of competition world premiere screening of his latest work, Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind”.
Murawski edited the reconstruction of Welles’ legendary unfinished film, which Netflix is releasing this fall.
Festival director Alberto Barbera said that Murawski’s 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.
In 1970, legendary director Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane”) began filming what would ultimately be his final cinematic opus with a cast of luminaries that included John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, and Welles’s partner during his later years, Oja Kodar. Beset by financial issues, the production ultimately stretched to 1976 and soon gained industry-wide notoriety, never to be completed or released.
Over a thousand reels of film languished in a Paris vault until March 2017, when producers Frank Marshall (who served as a production manager on Wind during in its initial shooting) and Filip Jan Rymsza spearheaded efforts to have Welles’s vision completed over 30 years after his death.
Bob Murawski, who is an Academy Award-winning film editor, is known for his long-time collaboration with Sam Raimi on “Army of Darkness”, “The Gift”, “Spider Man 1, 2 and 3”, and “Oz the Great and Powerful”.
In addition to his work with Raimi, Murawski won acclaim for his editing on Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 Best Picture Academy Award winner “The Hurt Locker”, for which he took home the coveted Oscar (shared with frequent co-editor and wife, Chris Innis) as well as the American Cinema Editors award, England’s BAFTA prize, and a slew of national film critics’ awards and nominations.
Other credits include “Godzilla: King Of The Monsters” and “Kong: Skull Island”.
Outside of the editing room, Murawski operates Grindhouse Releasing, a Hollywood-based distribution company 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”, the 1971 drive-in theatre epic “I Drink Your Blood”, and the late-sixties Burt Lancaster classic “The Swimmer”, which was awarded the Best Blu-ray of 2014 by the International Press Academy. Grindhouse Releasing is also committed to theatrical distribution. The company recently presented the premiere theatrical release of Duke Mitchell’s previously unfinished 1976 crime saga “Gone With The Pope”, and the restoration and re-release of the original “Evil Dead”, presented in glorious 35mm in theatres throughout the world.
