The Locarno Film Festival’s prestigious career achievement award, presented by Ascona-Locarno Tourism, will be given to the iconic superstar on the evening of Saturday, August 9. The actor will also introduce his films Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985), both directed and starring Jackie Chan, as part of the tribute. The audience will have an opportunity to meet Jackie Chan on Sunday, August 10 in a public panel conversation.
An Asian megastar, master filmmaker, and Hollywood mainstay beloved for action films that bridged the gap between East and West, Jackie Chan has for almost sixty years been one of the world’s most recognizable faces. After beginning as a child actor in the 1960s, Chan found major success in 1978 with Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, and over the next decade, Chan’s blend of kung-fu comedy was a reliable box-office draw for Golden Harvest, the legendary Hong Kong studio, with his audacious stunts and easy-going charisma drawing legions of adoring fans to cinemas.
By the 1990s, Jackie Chan was Asia’s highest grossing action star, and a career in Hollywood soon followed. The buddy comedy Rush Hour (1998) would cement Chan’s place as a global superstar unlike any before him. Jackie Chan’s career behind the camera, as a director of classics like Police Story (1985) or Armour of God (1986), adds further nuance to the image of this distinctive and idiosyncratic artist.
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival: “Director, producer, actor, screenwriter, choreographer, singer, athlete, and daredevil stuntman, Jackie Chan is both a key figure in contemporary Asian cinema and one whose influence has rewritten the rules of Hollywood cinema. From his years at the China Drama Academy under Master Yu Jim-Yuen, working at a very young age as a stuntman in King Hu’s masterpiece A Touch of Zen, Chan has continually reinvented martial arts cinema and much beyond it. A pure comic talent, he has absorbed the lessons of Buster Keaton and early cinema as his own, creating masterpieces that have captivated audiences around the world. With a sensibility worthy of the classic musical, he shaped an unprecedented poetics of the human body in motion. In cinema, there is a before Jackie Chan and an after Jackie Chan.”
The Pardo alla Carriera is made possible thanks to the support of Ascona-Locarno Tourism, the Destination Partner of the Locarno Film Festival, which is tasked with fostering the development and promotion of tourism in Lake Maggiore and the natural beauty surrounding Locarno. Previous winners of the Award have included Francesco Rosi, Claude Goretta, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Peter-Christian Fueter, Sergio Castellitto, Víctor Erice, Marlen Khutsiev, Bulle Ogier, Mario Adorf, Jane Birkin, Fredi M. Murer, Dante Spinotti, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, and, in 2024, Shah Rukh Khan.
The 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival will take place from 6-16 August 2025.
