James Gray Honored With Locarno Career Award
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- James Gray will receive the Pardo alla Carriera at the 79th Locarno Film Festival on August 9; Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro called him 'the last great novelist of American cinema' whose work 'echoes the Jewish diaspora, film noir, and Russian as well as North American literature.'
- Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, will screen on Locarno's 8,000-capacity Piazza Grande ahead of the ceremony, with We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008) also playing in the lineup.
- Gray first broke onto the international festival circuit at age 25 in 1994 with Little Odessa, which won the Venice Silver Lion, and the Locarno honor marks his first trip to the Swiss festival across a three-decade career that includes The Yards, The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z, Ad Astra and Armageddon Time.
- Paper Tiger world premiered in competition at Cannes in May and will open the 2026 New York Film Festival in September, putting Gray on three major festival stages in four months with a drama about two brothers drawn into the Russian mafia in 1980s New York.
- Previous Pardo alla Carriera recipients include Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, Shah Rukh Khan and Jackie Chan, who took the honor in 2025.
- The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs August 5–15, 2026, and the career award is sponsored by local agency Ascona-Locarno Tourism.
Why it matters: After three decades of filmmaking since his 1994 Venice Silver Lion win for Little Odessa, Gray is getting a career-spanning Locarno tribute — timed to the festival's largest 8,000-capacity Piazza Grande stage, where Paper Tiger screens alongside two earlier Gray titles, while the film also opens the 2026 New York Film Festival in September.
