Jane Campion to Receive Locarno Film Festival’s Pardo d’Onore Manor

Tony Maglio
·3 min read
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Jane Campion, director of “The Power of the Dog,” is the recipient of this year’s Pardo d’Onore Manor at the Locarno Film Festival — its award for outstanding achievement in cinema. So yes, the “Dog” director is getting a cat trophy: Pardo d’Onore translates to “Leopard of Honor” in English.

The award will be bestowed on August 16, 2024 at the 77th edition of the festival. Locarno will also feature screenings of two Campion movies as selected by the director herself: 1990’s “An Angel at My Table” and 1993’s “The Piano.” It will be a brand new 4K restoration of “The Piano” that audience in Switzerland sees.

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It’s quite an honor, but certainly not Campion’s first big award. She was the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (for “The Piano”). Campion is also the first woman to be nominated twice for Best Director at the Academy Awards; she won once, in 2021, for “The Power of the Dog.” She’s also the first filmmaker from New Zealand to compete at the Venice Film Festival and the first woman to win its Silver Lion for Best Director.

To date, Campion has made nine feature films, half-a-dozen shorts, and two seasons of the TV miniseries “Top of the Lake.” That body of work gave Giona A. Nazzaro, the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, plenty to talk about.

His statement, in full, reads: “With her directorial debut, ‘Sweetie’ (1989), Jane Campion asserted herself from the start as a distinctive and unmistakable voice. More than thirty years later, the values and extraordinary qualities of her filmmaking remain undiminished. Campion has sustained genuine complexity in her artistic practice, free to weave a dialogue with audiences and with the film industry in which she works without ever compromising on her vision and her artistic ambitions. Her work, peopled with tortured, fascinating characters and marked by an astonishing skill in grappling with the more disturbing side of the human condition, represents one of the undisputed pinnacles of contemporary filmmaking. Jane Campion’s artistic freedom and willingness to take risks to find new and deeper insights into the richness and complexities of human experience make her an unparalleled point of reference for anybody who thinks of film as an instrument of expression and emancipation. To offer the Pardo d’Onore to Jane Campion means — today — to welcome cinema in all its infinite possibilities and to look to the future without fear.”

The Pardo d’Onore Manor has previously been awarded to filmmakers such as Manoel de Oliveira, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda, Michael Cimino, Marco Bellocchio, John Waters, Kelly Reichardt and, in 2023, Harmony Korine. The “Manor” part has been around since 2017 — it is sponsorship for the festival’s event partner, Manor.

The 77th Locarno Film Festival will run from August 7-17, 2024.

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