Locarno 2026 Film Festival to Honor James Gray With Career Leopard

The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to James Gray, bestowing upon the U.S. filmmaker the Pardo alla Carriera, the Career Leopard, presented by Ascona-Locarno Tourism, during its 79^th edition.

Gray will receive the award in the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande on Sunday, Aug. 9, and present his latest film, Paper Tiger, after the ceremony. Two key titles by Gray, We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008), will also screen in the festival program. 
 
“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,” Locarno highlighted. “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 theBrighton Beach of his youth and shaped by a dialogue with classic American and European auteur cinema.”

Continued Locarno organizers: “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.”

Paper Tiger premiered in competition at Cannes this year and will open the 2026 New York Film Festival.

“James Gray is the last great novelist of American cinema,” said Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno’s artistic director. “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 on to future generations.”

The Pardo alla Carriera is being handed out with the support of Ascona-Locarno Tourism, the destination partner of the Locarno Film Festival, which focuses on the development and promotion of tourism in the region. Previous winners of the award include Francesco Rosi, Claude Goretta, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Peter-Christian Fueter, Sergio Castellitto, Otar Iosseliani, Víctor Erice, Marlen Khutsiev, Bulle Ogier, Mario Adorf, Jane Birkin, Fredi M. Murer, Dante Spinotti, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, Shah Rukh Khan, and, last year, Jackie Chan. 

The 79^th edition of Locarno takes place Aug. 5-15.