Locarno Festival pays tribute to Bollywood legend Shah Rukh Khan

“I don’t want to sound like a fanboy,” says Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, shyly, “but Shah Rukh Khan embodies the quintessence of the power of cinema. There’s no cynicism, no manipulation. Just this fundamental faith that you can tell a story through your character and touch on the fundamental elements of emotion.”

Nazzaro, it’s safe to say, is a Khan fanboy. Speaking of the Bollywood superstar, winner of Locarno’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award, the Pardo alla Carriera Ascona-Locarno Tourism, he compares Khan to the “popular glamour of a working-class hero, like Marcello Mastroianni” combined with “the elegance, the arrogance, of someone like Alain Delon… In Shah Rukh Khan, I can see the trajectory from Rudolph Valentino to Tom Cruise, and it’s all there in one person. And this guy doesn’t even seem to sweat when he does it.”

Khan will be honored with Locarno’s Lifetime Achievement Award on August 10 and will participate in a Q&A at the festival on August 11.

As part of its tribute, Locarno will screen Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film DevdasThe 2002 drama film in which Khan plays a wealthy law graduate who returns from London to marry his childhood sweetheart, Parvati (played by Aishwarya Rai). However, when his family rejects their marriage, he descends into alcoholism and seeks refuge with a warm-hearted courtesan, played by Madhuri Dixit.

Nazzaro notes that Locarno could have chosen almost any film from Khan’s decades-long career to illustrate his impact on the silver screen.

“I have seen some of his films only in India because there are no subtitled versions available, and everything is perfectly understandable, without the dialogues,” says Nazzaro. “I mean you see the trajectory of a hero, [the] “He has a fundamental belief that if you’re a hard worker, if you’re a decent person, you can be a hero. He embodies that. He’s a practicing Muslim, he’s never made a film that’s not in line with his own beliefs.”

While building an international career, Nazzaro says, Khan has remained entirely true to himself and to the traditions of Indian cinema.

“In Khan, you have the truly inimitable elements of Indian cinema, the music, the dances, the songs,” says Nazzaro, “and then you have this astounding understanding of how to place all of these mythological elements of the narrative in a modern context, using modern technology to reach a pinnacle of what I would say is an almost pre-modern understanding of the power of cinema… I don’t want to wax poetic, but [in Western cinema] We needed modernism to understand our narrative structures. Then we had to question that, with postmodernism. Today we have post-postmodernism. It seems that we cannot recover the last innocence in the pleasure of…