The Locarno Film Festival will celebrate Virginie Efira, the Belgian-born, France-based actress who was recently in Cannes with lead roles in two competition films: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden” and Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales.”
Efira will be feted by the Swiss fest, which is Europe’s preeminent event dedicated to indie cinema, with its Leopard Club Award. She will receive the prize on Aug. 7 when “All of a Sudden,” for which Efira won acting honors in Cannes — and for which she learned to act partly in Japanese — will screen in the lakeside town’s 6,500-seat outdoor Piazza Grande venue.
In a statement, the fest noted that Efira’s career trajectory has been marked by “memorable turns” in works by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven and by “Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker Justine Triet.
“In Verhoeven’s ‘Elle’ (2016), and especially in ‘Benedetta’ (2021), Efira demonstrated a willingness to inhabit provocative, demanding characters whose thorny complexities resist easy categorization,” the statement said. “Her extraordinary performances in Triet’s ‘Victoria’ (2016) and ‘Sibyl’ (2019) likewise confirmed that gift and, along with a handful of other remarkable films of that period, secured her status as one of the rising stars of modern European cinema.”
