The Locarno Film Festival will hand its Pardo alla Carriera career achievement award to veteran actor Jackie Chan during this year’s edition, which runs August 6-16.
Chan will pick up the award on Aug 6. The actor will also introduce his films Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985) as part of the tribute and take part in a Q&A session on August 10.
“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,” Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, said in a statement.
“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.”
Previous winners of the Pardo alla Carriera award include 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.
