Alfonso Cuarón to Receive Locarno Film Festival Lifetime Award

Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker known for the likes of Gravity, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Roma, will receive a lifetime achievement award at the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.

He will receive the honor, a tribute to “film personalities with extraordinary careers,” on Sunday, Aug. 11 in the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande after audiences can catch a panel conversation with him earlier in the day.

“From low-budget films in Mexico to blockbusters in Hollywood, from adaptations of Charles Dickens, P.D. James or Harry Potter to the audacity and delicacy of modern classics, such as Y tu mamá también (2001), Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018) — which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival — Alfonso Cuarón has embodied the true spirit of a chameleonic contemporary artist able to master any assignment,” Locarno fest organizers said. “Though known for the dynamic long-takes that characterize the most memorable sequences in his films, Cuarón is also an exceptionally assured director of actors, excelling in bringing iconic and often career-best performances out of stars, ranging from those in Mexico, like Diego Luna or Gael García Bernal, to abroad, as with Julianne Moore, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine and Clive Owen, to name but a few.”

The filmmaker won two Oscars for Gravity and three for Roma, his semi-autographical take on his upbringing in Mexico City, including the best director honor for both movies.

Noted Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival: “Alfonso Cuarón is a visionaryauthor of agile and liberated imaginaries. Combining an experimental spirit with the sweep of great popular writers, he has managed to capture the imagination and hearts of millions of viewers, passing on the same wonder that he himself experienced as a child and teenager basking in the glow of classic Mexican cinema.”

He added: “From coming-of-age novels to science fiction, from melodrama to grand sagas like Harry Potter, Alfonso Cuarón has reinvented himself as an artist with each new film, always in the service of the pleasure of cinema, and has thus created a truly multifaceted body of work.”

Concluded Nazzaro: “From coming-of-age novels to science fiction, from melodrama to grand sagas like Harry Potter, Alfonso Cuarón has reinvented himself as an artist with each new film, always in the service of the pleasure of cinema.”

During its 77th edition, which runs Aug. 7-17, the Locarno festival is paying tribute to Cuarón not only with the lifetime honor but also with the screening of Alain Tanner’s Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000), which the fest noted has been “personally selected by Cuarón.” Before the screening, the filmmaker will discuss its significance both for his own work and film history in general.

Other Locarno77 honorees include Jane Campion, Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan, Erin Brockovich and Django Unchained producer Stacey Sher and Ben Burtt, the man behind the voices of R2-D2, E.T. and Wall-E.