Nebraska director Alexander Payne will receive the Pardo d’Onore at the Locarno Film Festival.
The American filmmaker will be presented with the honorary leopard on Friday, August 15. He will also present his 2011 pic The Descendants and 2013 title Nebraska and participate in a public discussion.
Payne, a writer-director also behind the likes of Sideway and The Holdovers, has won two Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and been nominated for Best Director on three occasions.
After studying filmmaking at UCLA, Payne wrote and directed politically-charged comedy Citizen Ruth, starring Laura Dern, in 1996. It premiered at Sundance and led to a run of seven influential films, which have starred the likes of Paul Giamatti, Reese Witherspoon and Jack Nicholson.
“Alexander Payne is an erudite auteur with an encyclopaedic cinephile knowledge,” said Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival. “Gifted with an unerring sense for the bittersweet facets of human comedy, he is a filmmaker with sensibilities at once exquisitely classical and modern.
“An impeccable director of actors, who has worked with such names as Jack Nicholson, George Clooney, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Matt Damon, Bruce Dern and Paul Giamatti, in Payne we find a knowledge of the savoir-faire of Hollywood cinema, its poetry, and its uniqueness… Author of a unique filmography in which he has always addressed the complexities of the human condition with a smile in a constant dialogue with audiences worldwide.”
Previous winners of the Pardo d’Onore include Manoel de Oliveira, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach, Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Terry Gilliam, Alexander Sokurov, William Friedkin, Alain Tanner, Jia Zhang-ke, Leos Carax, Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda, Michael Cimino, Marco Bellocchio, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jean-Marie Straub, Todd Haynes, Bruno Dumont, John Waters, John Landis, Kelly Reichardt, Harmony Korine and Jane Campion.
Locarno will be held this year from August 6-16 in Switzerland.
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