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Geneva:
Shah Rukh Khan, Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón and Irene Jacob will receive special awards at Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday. Founded in 1946, the annual festival is one of the world’s oldest and focuses on auteur films.
The festival takes place on the shores of Lake Maggiore in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino in southern Switzerland, with films screened in Locarno’s central square, a feature of Swiss national life depicted on the Swiss 20 franc banknote. The open-air piazza can accommodate up to 8,000 moviegoers, and films are shown on one of the world’s largest screens.
Bollywood superstar Khan, 58, will be conferred with the Pardo Ala Kalila Award on Saturday, given to those whose artistic contributions have redefined cinema.
“The richness and breadth of his contribution to Indian cinema is unprecedented,” said Giona A. Nazzaro, the festival’s artistic director. “Khan was a king who never lost touch with the audience that crowned him. This brave and daring artist was always willing to challenge himself.”
The 77th festival will run until August 17 and will screen 225 films, including 104 world premieres and 15 debuts.
The highest award at the Locarno Film Festival is the Golden Leopard. Previous winners include Roberto Rossellini, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Milos Forman, Mike Leigh and Jim Jarmusch. A total of 17 films (all world or international premieres) competed for the award, including films from Lithuania, France, Austria, Italy and South Korea. The Golden Leopard comes with a prize of CHF 75,000 (US$ 87,400), which is shared between the director and producer.
Switzerland’s biggest film festival will host a retrospective on Columbia Pictures’ 100th anniversary.
“A tortured but fascinating character”
Campion, of New Zealand, will be awarded the Order of the Leopard of Honor, which is given to outstanding figures in world cinema.
She is the first woman to be nominated for Best Director Oscar twice: piano (1993), then The power of dogs (2021), for which she won an Oscar. “Her work, filled with tortured yet fascinating characters and her astonishing skill in depicting the disturbing aspects of the human condition, represents one of the undisputed pinnacles of contemporary filmmaking,” said Nazzaro.
Previous winners include Ennio Morricone, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Verhoeven, Terry Gilliam and Werner Herzog.
Cuarón, the Mexican filmmaker who won the Oscar for Best Director for “Succession” gravity (2013) and Rome (2018), will receive a lifetime achievement award. “Cuarón reinvents himself as an artist with each new film,” said Nazaro.
French Swiss actress Jacob once starred The Double Life of Veronika (1991) and Three colors: red (1994) will receive the Leopard Club Award, given to a film work that captures the collective imagination.
Stacey Sher – American film producer pulp Fiction, Shorty in power, Gattaca, Erin Brockovich, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight – will receive the Raimondo Rezzonico Award for significant achievement in international filmmaking. Last year’s festival attracted nearly 150,000 people.
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