Los Angeles: Filmmaker James Gray, known for films such as 'The Yards', 'The Lost City of Z' and 'The Immigrant', will be honoured with a lifetime career award at the Locarno Film Festival.
The award will be presented to Gray on August 9. The festival will also screen his latest film 'Paper Tiger', which revolves around two brothers, an ex-cop (Adam Driver) and a hardworking engineer (Miles Teller), who pursue the American Dream by partnering with a waterfront cleanup venture tied to the Russian mafia.
His previous directorials, 'We Own the Night' and 'Two Lovers', will also screen at the festival, according to the entertainment news outlet Variety.
"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." read the festival's statement.
"Gray’s explorations of the often elusive promise of the American dream have, over the past decade, expanded into more varied thematic terrain, including colonial exploration, space travel and racial prejudice, while reshaping the popular understanding of his work and 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," it added.
Locarno artistic director Giona A Nazzaro said Gray is the "last great novelist of American cinema". "His films form a rich body of work that echoes the Jewish diaspora, film noir and Russian as well as North American literature," he said in a statement.
In 2025, Jackie Chan received the award. Locarno Film Festival is set to start on August 5 and will run until August 15 in Locarno, Switzerland. It will be the 79th edition of the festival.