The Locarno Film Festival will honor James Gray with a lifetime career award at this year’s edition, where the U.S. auteur’s most recent work, “Paper Tiger,” will screen.
Gray will receive the Pardo alla Carriera award on Aug. 9 and will present “Paper Tiger” — which launched in May from Cannes — at the fest’s Piazza Grande outdoor venue. Set in 1986, the film follows two brothers, Irwin (Miles Teller) and Gary Pearl (Adam Driver). Irwin becomes entangled with the Russian mob after embarking on a get-rich-quick scheme to clean up the Gowanus Canal, and his former cop brother, Gary, is the only one who can get him out of trouble. “Paper Tiger” will have its North American premiere as the opening night film of the 64th New York Film Festival on Sept. 25.
Two other titles directed by Gray, “We Own the Night” (2007) and “Two Lovers” (2008), will also screen at Locarno as part of the tribute.
“Since winning the Silver Lion at Venice for ‘Little Odessa’ (1994) at age 25, James Gray has forged a singular career rooted, with piercing realism, in his upbringing in New York’s Russian-Jewish community,” the fest said in a statement, citing Gray’s “The Yards” (2000), “We Own the Night” (2007), “Two Lovers” (2008) and “The Immigrant” (2013), which cemented Gray’s standing “as one of American cinema’s most artistically distinctive voices — a filmmaker as concerned with criminal underworlds, rendered with exacting detail, as with meticulous family portraiture, often situated within the Brighton Beach of his youth and shaped by a dialogue with classic American and European auteur cinema.”
The Locarno statement continued: “As he has established himself at the top tier of filmmakers in the United States, Gray’s explorations of the often elusive promise of the American dream have, over the past decade, expanded into more varied thematic terrain — colonial exploration, space travel, racial prejudice — that reshaped the popular understanding of his work while remaining distinctively his own: ‘The Lost City of Z’ (2016) with Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson, ‘Ad Astra’ (2019) with Brad Pitt and ‘Armageddon Time’ (2022) with Anthony Hopkins.”
Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro added, “James Gray is the last great novelist of American cinema. His films form a rich body of work that echoes the Jewish diaspora, film noir and Russian as well as North American literature.” He called Gray “a filmmaker with a humanist sensibility and profound cinephile knowledge” who “has experimented with genres such as science fiction and adventure while retaining his own artistic identity and voice.”
Previous winners of the Locarno Pardo alla Carriera Award include Francesco Rosi, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Jane Birkin, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, Shah Rukh Khan and Jackie Chan.
The 79th edition of Locarno will run Aug. 5-15.
