Michael Moore, Oscar®-winning filmmaker and Traverse City Film Festival founder and president, announced today that Jane Fonda will be honored with the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The award will be presented to Fonda during the festival’s 14th annual edition, running July 31 to August 5 along the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan in Traverse City, Michigan.
A two-time Oscar® winning actress (and seven-time Oscar® nominee), four-time Golden Globe® winner, two-time BAFTA winner, and Emmy® Award winner, Fonda is an American icon whose work both on screen and off has inspired audiences and women for decades.
“I can think of no other artist who has given more to her country,” said Moore. “What an honor for our festival audience to welcome and to be inspired by the work of this American Icon. Her voice is as needed today as much as ever.”
Moore will personally host the legendary actress, author, and activist at the Traverse City Film Festival, one of the most popular cultural events in the Midwest. The 2018 program is expected to result in more than 100,000 admissions to its roster of nearly 100 movies.
Fonda’s body of work includes “Coming Home” (for which she won the Academy Award® for Best Actress in 1978), “Klute” (for which she won the Academy Award® for Best Actress in 1971), ”They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”, “Julia,” “The China Syndrome,” “On Golden Pond,” and “The Morning After” (films for which she received five additional Academy Award® nominations), and more than 40 other films. Since 2015, she has starred in the irresistible Netflix sitcom “Grace and Frankie,” and just this past spring in the hit film “Book Club.”
Fonda is also the subject of the revealing new HBO documentary “Jane Fonda in Five Acts” directed by Susan Lacy, which will screen at the festival, with Fonda and Lacy in attendance.
The festival will also present a 40th anniversary screening of “Coming Home,” a screening of “Julia”, and a free nighttime screening of “Nine to Five” projected on a 65-foot screen at the festival’s open space on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Fonda’s lifetime commitment to social change has also inspired a generation of artists and activists. She chairs the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, sits on the boards of Women’s Day Media Center, which she helped found, and V-Day: Until the Violence Stops. She established the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at the Emory School of Medicine and has long been a leading advocate for environmental issues, human rights, and the empowerment of women and girls.