LA Film Critics to honor Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Harry Belafonte; announce awards date

106-year old Norman Lloyd will be the recipient of the Legacy Award

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has chosen director/screenwriter/producer/actor Hou Hsiao-Hsien and singer/songwriter/activist/actor Harry Belafonte as the recipients of this year’s Career Achievement Awards, and has chosen actor/producer/director Norman Lloyd as the recipient of the Legacy Award.

LAFCA’s other top awards will be decided by the membership on Sunday, December 20, 2020, and those winners will be honored alongside Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Harry Belafonte, and Norman Lloyd. 

“In light of the challenges that 2020 has presented, we are particularly thrilled to be expressing our profound admiration this year for our esteemed honorees,” said LAFCA president Claudia Puig. “In addition to our two brilliant Career Achievement winners, it’s an honor to create an award worthy of an inspirational figure in time for his 106th birthday. We’re so glad to present Norman Lloyd with the first-ever LAFCA Legacy Award and to celebrate the consummate artists Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Harry Belafonte with Career Achievement awards.”

Hou Hsiao-Hsien emerged as a leading figure in Taiwanese cinema in the 1980s and ’90s and is now widely recognized as one of the world’s greatest, most influential filmmakers. Over the course of his four-decade career he has written and directed features including A Time to Live and a Time to Die; The Puppetmaster; Goodbye South, Goodbye; Flowers of Shanghai; Millennium Mambo; Three Times; and Flight of the Red Balloon. Hailed for their exquisite visual beauty, narrative innovation, historical depth and formal mastery, Hou’s films have won numerous international prizes, including the Golden Lion at the 1989 Venice International Film Festival for A City of Sadness and Best Director at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for The Assassin.

Harry Belafonte is a living legend. After coming to prominence as a hugely successful pop star, this Jamaican-American singer also left an indelible mark as a producer, actor and activist. An icon of the civil rights movement, he made his film debut over 60 years ago in Bright Road and had a notable role, appropriately, as a civil rights pioneer in 2018’s BlacKkKlansman. He also had lead roles in Carmen Jones and Island in the Sun and has produced 14 movies. He famously starred with Sidney Poitier in Buck and the Preacher and Uptown Saturday Night. Belafonte has broken barriers throughout his career, becoming the first Black television producer, and the first Black artist to win an Emmy.

Norman Lloyd’s career spans nine decades in the entertainment industry. Lloyd entered the world before D.W. Griffith finished his first feature. For over a century, he’s kept pace with the evolution of storytelling, a living link connecting Charlie Chaplin to Judd Apatow. From launching the Mercury Theatre alongside Orson Welles to dangling off the Statue of Liberty for Alfred Hitchcock to conquering TV in black-and-white and color, his work has attacked fascism, tickled spines and delighted generations.