Javier Bardem will collect a lifetime achievement award at the Rome Film Festival next month, with Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino presenting the honor. Salvatore Nastasi, president of the Fondazione Cinema per Roma, announced the tribute following a recommendation from artistic director Paola Malanga. The festival runs October 13 through 25 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica.
Bardem will mark the occasion by introducing a screening of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, which premiered at Cannes and will play in Rome’s best-of-the-fests selection. He plays Esteban Martínez, a celebrated but troubled director who reconnects with his estranged daughter, an actress struggling to build her own career, and agrees to make a film with her. The project forces both to reckon with a shared past they had long avoided.
The award arrives during one of the busiest stretches of Bardem’s career. He recently appeared at the Venice Film Festival alongside his wife, Penélope Cruz, in Florian Zeller’s Bunker, playing an architect whose 17-year marriage frays after he takes on a commission to build a survivalist shelter for a tech billionaire. Bardem is also set to return as Stilgar, the Fremen leader who aids Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three. He recently finished shooting Hello & Paris for Amazon MGM Studios, opposite Kate Hudson.
Sorrentino, who won an Academy Award for The Great Beauty, brings his own festival pedigree to the presentation. Bardem, meanwhile, remains one of Spanish cinema’s most decorated exports: an Academy Award winner for No Country for Old Men, with additional prizes from Cannes and two Volpi Cups from Venice to his name, alongside seven Goya Awards at home.
His filmography spans collaborations with Woody Allen, Sam Mendes, Julian Schnabel, Aaron Sorkin and Alejandro Amenábar, among others, over a career that began in Spanish cinema in the mid-1990s. Rome’s tribute adds to a run of festival honors for the actor in recent years, following a similar lifetime achievement recognition at San Sebastián.
