The Locarno Film Festival will honor Jane Campion with its Pardo d’onore Manor award.
The prominent Swiss fest dedicated to indie cinema will celebrate the revered auteur from New Zealand on Aug. 16 during a ceremony on its 8,000-seat Piazza Grande. The following day Campion will hold an onstage conversation. Champion’s “An Angel at My Table” (1990) and “The Piano” (1993) – the latter presented in a new 4K restoration – have been selected as Locarno’s tribute screenings.
“Jane Campion’s biography is a succession of remarkable firsts,” the fest noted in a statement, citing the facts that Campion is the first woman to win the Cannes Palme d’Or for “The Piano”; the first woman to get nominated twice in the best director category at the Academy Awards – winning once for “The Power of the Dog” in 2021 –; and the first filmmaker from New Zealand to compete at the Venice Film Festival and to win Venice’s Silver Lion for best director, also for “Power of the Dog.”
“Over the course of nine feature films, half a dozen shorts, and two seasons of the television miniseries “Top of the Lake” (2013-17), Campion has established herself as one of the key architects of the contemporary cinematic imagination,” the statement said.
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Locarno’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro further stated that “Campion has sustained genuine complexity in her artistic practice, free to weave a dialogue with audiences and with the film industry in which she works without ever compromising on her vision and her artistic ambitions.”
Previous recipients of the Locarno award include Samuel Fuller, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach, Sidney Pollack, Kelly Reichardt, Abbas Kiarostami, and Agnès Varda.
The 77th edition of Locarno will run Aug. 7-17.
