The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to James Gray, bestowing upon the U.S. filmmaker the Pardo alla Carriera, the Career Leopard, presented by Ascona-Locarno Tourism, during its 79th edition. Gray will receive the award in the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande on Sunday, Aug. 9, and present his latest film, Paper Tiger, after the ceremony. Two key titles by Gray, We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008), will also screen in the festival program. “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,” Locarno highlighted. “Films like The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008), and The Immigrant (2013), cemented Gray’s place 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 theBrighton Beach of his youth and shaped by a dialogue with classic American and European auteur cinema.”
Continued Locarno organizers: “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.”
