Alfonso Cuarón to receive Locarno Festival Lifetime Award

Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker known for films like Gravity, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban And Romewill receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.

He will receive the honor, a tribute to “film personalities with extraordinary careers,” on Sunday, August 11, in the Swiss city’s Piazza Grande, after the public was able to attend a roundtable discussion with him earlier in the day.

“From low-budget films in Mexico to blockbusters in Hollywood, from adaptations of Charles Dickens, PD James or Harry Potter to the audacity and delicacy of modern classics, such as And your mother too (2001), Gravity (2013) and Rome (2018) — which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival — Alfonso Cuarón embodies the true spirit of a chameleon-like contemporary artist capable of mastering any task,” said the organizers of the Locarno festival. “While known for the long, dynamic takes that characterize the most memorable sequences in his films, Cuarón is also an exceptionally confident director of actors, excelling in portraying iconic and often career-best stars, from those from Mexico, such as Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, to those from abroad, such as Julianne Moore, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Michael Caine and Clive Owen, to name a few.”

The filmmaker won two Oscars for Gravity and three for Romehis semi-autographic look at his upbringing in Mexico City, including winning Best Director for both films.

Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, said: “Alfonso Cuarón is a visionary
“A writer with an agile and liberated imagination, he has conquered the imagination and hearts of millions of spectators by combining experimental spirit and the scope of great popular writers, transmitting the same wonder that he himself experienced as a child and adolescent bathed in the brilliance of classic Mexican cinema.”

He added: “From initiatory novels to science fiction, from melodrama to great 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 work.”

Nazzaro concludes: “From initiatory novels to science fiction, from melodrama to great 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 will take place from August 7 to 17, the Locarno festival will pay tribute to Cuarón not only by awarding him a lifetime achievement prize, but also by screening Alain Tanner’s film Jonas who will be 25 in the year 2000 (Jonas who will be 25 in the year 2000), which was “personally selected by Cuarón,” the festival noted. Before the screening, the filmmaker will discuss its importance to his own work and to the history of cinema in general.

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