Alfonso Cuarón will be receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.
The five-time Academy Award-winning Mexican filmmaker will be celebrated August 11 in Piazza Grande. The event will include a panel conversation at Forum @Spazio Cinema, moderated by Cinémathèque suisse director Frédéric Maire. The ceremony will accompanied by the screening of Alain Tanner’s “Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000),” a 1976 film that was personally selected by Cuarón.
Cuarón’s own filmography includes the iconic “Y tu mamá también,” Academy Award-winning films “Gravity,” and “Roma,” as well as novel adaptations such as “Great Expectations,” “A Little Princess,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” and “Children of Men.”
“Alfonso Cuarón is a visionary author of agile and liberated imaginaries,” Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, said in a press statement. “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. 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.”
Cuarón’s next project is actually a TV show: Apple TV+ series “Disclaimer” starring Cate Blanchett. It’s Cuarón’s first series since 2014’s “Believe,” which aired only 12 episodes on NBC before being canceled. “Disclaimer” stars Blanchett as an acclaimed journalist who built her reputation revealing the misdeeds and transgressions of others, the logline reads. Yet when she receives a novel from an unknown author, Catherine (Blanchett) is horrified to realize she is now the main character in a story that exposes her darkest secrets. Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lesley Manville, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Louis Partridge, Leila George, and Hoyeon co-star.
The Locarno Film Festival will take place from August 7-17 and will additionally honor Jane Campion with the Pardo d’Onore Manor, an award for outstanding achievement in cinema. Campion’s 1990 film “An Angel at My Table” and a new 4K restoration of 1993’s “The Piano” will both screen.
