Alfonso Cuarón to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award at Locarno Film Festival

The Locarno Film Festival is honored to pay tribute to Alfonso Cuarón with the Lifetime Achievement Award, 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, 1976), personally selected by Cuarón. Before the screening of Tanner’s film, Cuarón will discuss its significance both for his own work and film history in general. The conversation will be moderated by Frédéric Maire, director of Cinémathèque suisse, and is organized in collaboration with Les Films du Camélia.

Alfonso Cuaron has moved between low-budget films in Mexico to blockbusters in Hollywood, from adaptations like Great Expectations (1998), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and Children of Men(2006), to Y tu mamá también (2001), the Academy Award-winning Gravity (2013), and Roma (2018

Giona A. Nazzaro, Director of Locarno Film Festival states “Alfonso Cuarón is a visionary author of agile and liberated imaginaries” He continues”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.”

The 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award will be given on the evening of Sunday, August 11 in Piazza Grande. That same day, at the Forum @Spazio Cinema, Cuarón will participate in a public conversation with the Festival audience, moderated by Manlio Gomarasca.

The 77th Locarno Film Festival will take place from 7 to 17 August 2024.