Darren Aronofsky.
Keystone-SDA
American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky will be given the Leopard of Honour (Pardo d’Onore) at the 79th Locarno Film Festival. Aronofsky will receive the award on August 14 on the Piazza Grande.
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Aronofsky is an American film director and screenwriter. He is known for films such as The Whale, starring Brendan Fraser. The film was in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. Eleven years earlier, Aronofsky was nominated for an Oscar for his psychological thriller Black Swan. In the same year, he presided over the jury in Venice. This was followed in 2014 by the biblical film Noah starring Russel Crowe.
Aronofsky, who comes from a family of Jewish teachers, began working on his first feature film, Pi, in 1996 and received the award for best director at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. His other awards include the Golden Lion in Venice in 2008 for The Wrestler – and a nomination for the Golden Raspberry (Worst Director) in 2018 for Mother!, which received a mixed reception overall.
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Place in contemporary cinema
In contemporary cinema, Aronofsky “has carved out a space in contemporary cinema that defies tidy categorisation”, wrote the Locarno Film Festival in a press release on Tuesday. “By turns provocative, spiritual, and formally daring, his films have for more than a quarter century probed the outer limits of faith, desire, and obsession,” it continued.
Locarno’s Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro points out that Aronofsky has never failed to “challenge conventions and expectations” and has never tried to “simply to please either the public or the industry”.
For the upcoming 79th edition, the Locarno Film Festival (August 5-15) has included the two films Fountain (2006) and Mother! in its programme.
The Festival has been awarding the Leopard of Honour with the support of Manor since 2017; recent winners include Alexander Payne, Jane Campion and Harmony Korine.
Adapted from German by AI/ts
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