The Locarno Film Festival will honor U.S. director James Gray with career achievement award, the Pardo alla Carriera, at its upcoming 79th edition in August.

Gray will receive the award on August 9 ahead of an open-air screening of Paper Tiger on the festival’s landmark 8,000-capacity Piazza Grande. Two other key titles in his filmography –  We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008) –  will also play in the line-up.

It marks a first trip to Locarno for Gray who first broke onto the international festival scene in 1994 at the age of 25 with Venice Silver Lion-winning drama Little Odessa, inspired by his own upbringing in New York’s Russian-Jewish community.

He continued to mine New York’s rich migrant culture and criminal underworlds with The Yards (2000), We Own the Night, Two Lovers, and The Immigrant (2013), branching out into other worlds with 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.

“James Gray is the last great novelist 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,” said Locarno Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro.

“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.”

Starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, Paper Tiger world premiered in competition at Cannes in May and will open the 2026 New York Film Festival in September.

The drama, following two brothers whose hopes for a better life draw them into the orbit of the Russian mafia, sees Gray return to the New York milieu of his early work and to the 1980s of his childhood.

Gray teamed with his frequent collaborators including Cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay, Composer Christopher Spelman, Production Designer Happy Massee, Casting Director Douglas Aibel, Editor Scott Morris, and Costume Designer Amy Roth.

Paper Tiger is produced by Gray alongside Rodrigo Teixeira, Anthony Katagas, Raffaella Leone, Andrea Leone, Marco Perego, Gary Farkas, Leonardo Maria del Vecchio, Carlo Salem, Andrea Bucko.

Previous recipients of the Pardo Alla Carriere – which is sponsored by local tourism agency Ascona-Locarno Tourism – have included Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Peter-Christian Fueter, Sergio Castellitto, Otar Iosseliani, Jane Birkin, Dante Spinotti, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, Shah Rukh Khan and, in 2025, Jackie Chan.

The 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival will take place from 5 to 15 August 2026