Finnish director to receive Carrosse d’Or from French Film Directors Guild.

Aki Kaurismaki

Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, The Man Without A Past) will be honoured with the Carrosse d’Or (Golden Coach) award during Directors’ Fortnight this year.

The annual honorary prize is granted by the French film directors guild, Société des Réalisateurs de films (la SFR), which also organises the parallel section.

In a letter to the director, the SFR selection committee praised his work for its “economy, precision and grandeur”.

“Your stories are fairy-tales about the forgotten, the ignored, the excessive, those who do not have a users manual,” read the letter.

“By capturing these characters, you give them a place, you save them, for those who aren’t talked about don’t exist.”

The award will be presented at the Directors’ Fortnight opening ceremony.

A regular on the Croisette, Kaurismäki was last in Cannes in 2011 with the Palme d’Or contender Le Havre.

He first attended Directors’ Fortnight in 1987 with Shadows In Paradise – a love story between a truck driver and a supermarket cashier — and returned in 1994, with the 1960s-set road movie Tatjana.

The Carrosse d’Or prize was launched by the SFR in 2002 to celebrate directors whose films are “innovative”, “audacious” and “uncompromising” in their mise-en-scène and production.

Past recipients include Jane Campion, Clint Eastwood, Nanni Moretti, David Cronenberg, Naomi Kawase, Agnès Varda, Jafar Panahi and Nuri Bilge Ceylan.