Darren Aronofsky to Receive Locarno Film Festival’s Honorary Leopard

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The Locarno Film Festival will celebrate American filmmaker Darren Aronofsky with its Honorary Leopard, the Pardo d’Onore, presented by Manor, at its 79th edition this summer, organizers said on Tuesday.

Lauding Aronofsky as a “visionary,” the festival said he will receive the homor on Friday, Aug. 14 on the Swiss city’s Piazza Grand. He will also present two of his films as part of the festival, namely The Fountain (2006) and Mother! (2017).

“With era-defining films like π (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), the Venice Film Festival award winner The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan (2010), Noah (2014), and The Whale (2022), for which Brendan Fraser was deservedly awarded best actor at the Academy Awards, Darren Aronofsky has carved out a space in contemporary cinema that defies tidy categorization,” Locarno said. “By turns provocative, spiritual, and formally daring, his films have for more than a quarter century probed the outer limits of faith, desire, and obsession.”

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Locarno concluded that Aronofsky would receive the honor in recognition of “his singularity as an artistic force.”

Said Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno’s artistic director: “An auteur who has made the sheer force of creativity, invention, and audacity his trademark, Darren Aronofsky has never failed to challenge conventions and expectations, nor attempted simply to please either the public or the industry. As a filmmaker, he has succeeded in creating an unmistakable body of work, such that the adjective ‘Aronofskian’ is now used to characterize a deeply personal and unconventional style that nonetheless moves freely between different genres and approaches – in his specific case anchored in those themes and obsessions that he has tirelessly explored: faith, motherhood, the conflicts with authoritarian father figures, and the challenges inherent in the creation of societies.”

He added: “Aronofsky embodies the pleasure of cinema as risk and constant challenge. Celebrating his work in Locarno, welcoming him to the Piazza Grande, is a tribute to creativity’s essential beauty, challenges, and necessity.”

The Pardo d’Onore has, since 2017, been awarded with the support of Locarno festival event partner Mano. Previous recipients include Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach, Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Terry Gilliam, Alexander Sokurov, William Friedkin, Jia Zhang-ke, Leos Carax, Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda, Marco Bellocchio, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Todd Haynes, John Waters, John Landis, Kelly Reichardt, Harmony Korine, Jane Campion, and, last year, Alexander Payne.

The 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival will take place Aug. 5-15.

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