The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to American filmmaker James Gray with the Pardo alla Carriera, presented by Ascona-Locarno Tourism, during its 79th edition.
Gray will receive the award in Piazza Grande on Sunday 9 August 2026 and will present his latest film Paper Tiger (2026) after the ceremony.
Two key titles by Gray, We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008), will also show in the festival programme.
“Since winning the Silver Lion at Venice for Little Odessa (1994) at age 25, James Gray has forged a singular career rooted, with piercing realism, in his upbringing in New York’s Russian Jewish community,” said a press release.
“Films like The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008), and The Immigrant (2013) cemented Gray’s place as one of American cinema’s most artistically distinctive voices – a filmmaker as concerned with criminal underworlds, rendered with exacting detail, as with meticulous family portraiture, often situated within the Brighton Beach of his youth and shaped by a dialogue with classic American and European auteur cinema.
“As he has established himself at the top tier of filmmakers in the United States, Gray’s explorations of the often elusive promise of the American dream have, over the past decade, expanded into more varied thematic terrain – colonial exploration, space travel, racial prejudice – that reshaped the popular understanding of his work while remaining distinctively his own: The Lost City of Z (2016) with Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson, Ad Astra (2019) with Brad Pitt, and Armageddon Time (2022) with Anthony Hopkins.
“With Paper Tiger, which premiered in Competition at Cannes this year and will open the 2026 New York Film Festival, Gray returns to the New York milieu of his early work and to the 1980s of his childhood, following two brothers whose hopes for a better life draw them into the orbit of the Russian mafia.”
Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director, said: “James Gray is the last great novellist of American cinema. His films form a rich body of work that echoes the Jewish diaspora, film noir, and Russian as well as North American literature.
“A filmmaker with a humanist sensibility and profound cinephile knowledge, he has experimented with genres such as science fiction and adventure while retaining his own artistic identity and voice.
“Celebrating James Gray at the Locarno Film Festival means paying tribute to a unique and unmistakable artist, a filmmaker who speaks the language of cinema and knows how to pass it onto future generations.”
The 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival will take place from 5 to 15 August 2026.
