Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero arrive to the CineFest to the Ambassadors of European Cinema awards ceremony to be held on the 19^th of September at 6:30 PM in the Pressburger-room of House of Arts. The ceremony is followed by the screening of Django (dir.: Sergio Corbucci, 1966) and the screening of Julia (dir.: Fred Zinnemann, 1977) in which Vanessa Redgrave gives an Oscar-winning performance.

Vanessa Redgrave is an Oscar, Golden Globe, Emmy and Tony Awards winning actress who has also won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, the Screen Actors Guild Award and a BAFTA TV Award – to name only the most important awards she has been given. She was nominated for the Academy Award six times and during her career she has worked with legendary directors, such as Tony Richardson, Bille August – who is one of the guests of honor and this years Lifetime Achievement Award recipient at the CineFest – James Ivory, Karel Reisz, Fred Zinnemann, Joe Wright, Sidney Lumet, Richard Attenborough and Michelangelo Antonioni.

She is the Goodwill Ambassador of the UNICEF.

She reigns as a queen both on stage and in screen. As a member of the theatrical Redgrave-family (her father was the renowned theatre actor, Sir Michael Redgrave) she settled on acting at an early age. Vanessa Redgrave was unforgettable in the role of Isadora Duncan just like in other films like Julia, Oh! What a Lovely War, Murder on the Orient Express, Mission Impossible and Howards End – to point out only a few of the hundreds of roles she has played so far.

Franco Nero, the blue-eyed Italian actor famous for his steely-look became well-known after playing the leading role in Django in 1966. Sergio Corbucci’s italowestern is a real cult classic: several unofficial and official sequels of Django have been produced and it inspired directors such as Quentin Tarantino. In Django Unchained directed by Tarantino, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx, the legendary Nero appears in a cameo role.

In 1967 Nero played the legendary Lancelot Du Lac in Camelot. This is his first movie with Vanessa Redgrave, who he fell in love with and had a child shortly after. Franco Nero married the Academy Award winning actress in 2006. Hundreds of thousands remember Damiano Damiani’s mafia movies from the 1970s like Confessions of a Police Captain or How to Kill a Judge. Similarly well-know is Keoma by Enzo G. Castellari, The Day of the Owl (in which Nero plays with Claudia Cardinale, our Lifetime Achievement Award winner of 2015) or Querelle and Tristana by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Luis Buñuel.

Franco Nero has several Hungarian ties. He played in The Conquest and Sacra Corona by Gábor Koltay and, in 2008, the leading role in Tamás Almási’s Márió, a varázsló [Mario, the Magician].

In Die Hard 2 he played the main antagonist with Bruce Willis. In 2005 Nero made his directorial debut with Forever Blues. In 2017 he played Julius in John Wick: Chapter 2. But this is only a short, hand-picked list of the more than 200 films Franco Nero played in so far.