Veteran filmmaker Martin Scorsese will be presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 13th annual Rome Film Fest that takes place from October 18 to 28. The award was announced on Tuesday by the festival's director Antonio Monda and Laura Delli Colli, head of the Fondazione Cinema per Roma. 

"I am extremely honoured to bestow the Lifetime Achievement Award to a cinema master," said Monda, adding, "I am thrilled and moved to celebrate Martin Scorsese, not only as a great director but also for his extraordinary and priceless contribution to the rediscovery of great classic films and, most of all, of Italian cinema."

In 1999, Scorsese, whose grandparents emigrated to the United States from Palermo, Sicily, made the documentary, My Voyage to Italy, that looked at Italian cinema history, marking films which were influential for the filmmaker, and particularly covering the Italian neorealism period.

The director of acclaimed films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, and The Wolf of Wall Street, has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards over his career, and won the Oscar for The Departed in 2006. His upcoming film The Irishman, starring Jesse Plemons, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, is expected to be released on Netflix in 2019.