Steven Spielberg to receive lifetime honour from Berlin Film Festival

Not Your Average Joe A documentary about the career of legendary production designer Joe Alves (Jaws, Close Encounters) and his four decades in Hollywood.

Spinning his stories on celluloid Steven Spielberg has created a lifetime of entertainment, thrills and thought-provoking cinema, which is now set to be honoured with a prestigious lifetime achievement award.

And now the director of Bruce the shark in JAWS, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan will be given his lifetime award of an honorary Golden Bear in February.

Previous honorary recipients of the award include James Stewart (1982), Alec Guinness (1988), Dustin Hoffman (1989), Oliver Stone (1990), Kirk Douglas (2001) and Wim Wenders (2015).

The news of the announcement makes for a nice early birthday present, Spielberg turns 76 in December. It almost rounds of a year that has seen a continued high for the filmmaker who was nominated for an Oscar for directing West Side Story, saw JAWS and E.T. – the extra-terrestrial both wow new and old audiences alike in IMAX and Real D 3D, Close Encounters of the Third Kind celebrate turning 45, Poltergeist turn 40 and one of his most personal projects, The Fabelemans, hit the big screen.

Oh, and his Oscar nomination for West Side Story – finally an Oscar nod for a Steven Spielberg Shark film - saw the director become the first in history to be nominated for six Academy Awards in six separate decades. As Quint in JAWS would say, not a bad record for this vicinity.

It all must seem a very far cry from when the young Spielberg was filmed not receiving a Best Director nomination for JAWS, as he famously commented at the time, he got beaten out by Fellini.

Words by Dean Newman

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