Restored version of Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate will screen after the ceremony.

Michael Cimino will be honoured with the Persol 2012 award of the Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September 2012), which celebrates “a legend of international filmmaking”.

Festival director Alberto Barbera said: “It is a belated but long overdue acknowledgment of the greatness of a visionary filmmaker, one of the most intense and original voices in American filmmaking of the last forty years, gradually reduced to silence after the box-office flop of a masterpiece to which the film producers contributed with senseless cuts. By virtue of his immense talent, Cimino has exalted the filmmaking art and offered a portrait of America both critical and passionate, lucid and compelling.”

The award will be presented to Cimino at a ceremony on Thursday 30 August at the Lido.

A restored version of the director’s epic Heaven’s Gate will screen after the ceremony. The film was originally presented in Venice at the 1982 Film Festival.