Master Director

(WANG XIAOCHUAN)

Chinese director John Woo Yu-Sen will receive the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 67th Venice Film Festival on September 1-11, 2010, organizers said. Woo is the first Chinese filmmaker to receive this prestigious award.

"The acknowledgment recognizes a filmmaker who in recent decades, with his revolutionary conception of staging and editing, has renewed action movies to the core, introducing an extreme stylization close to visual art, both in Asia and in Hollywood," organizers said on the festival's website. They said Woo was "an innovator of the contemporary language of cinema."

Woo, 61, began his career as a film director in Hong Kong in the 1970s and made his name with stylish action films such as A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled. After moving to Hollywood in 1993, he directed several box-office blockbusters, including Broken Arrow, Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II.

Woo's war epic, Red Cliff, was released in the United States on December 18, 2009. It pulled in nearly 580 million yuan ($85 million) in ticket sales in earlier screenings in China.