Actor Riz Ahmed will be the recipient of the Excellence Award Davide Campari at the 76th edition of the Locarno Film Festival taking place from August 2nd to 12th.
Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival said, “Ahmed is a brilliant and versatile talent in cinema today. Chameleon-like, he can move from blockbuster to auteur movies, equally at ease on stage or TV, rapping with a mic or intervening as executive producer. Already with one Academy Award under his belt, not to mention a pile of other prizes, he is the embodiment of a kind of cinema that is becoming better, more receptive, finally able to listen to new voices. Riz Ahmed is the face of a future finally becoming possible.”
Ahmed joins a long list of prestigious prize winners already announced for the 76th edition: Harmony Korine for the Pardo d’onore Manor, Pietro Scalia for the Vision Award Ticinomoda, Luc Jacquet for the Locarno Kids Award la Mobiliare, Marianne Slot for the Raimondo Rezzonico Award, Tsai Ming-liang for the Pardo alla carriera Ascona-Locarno Tourism and Renzo Rossellini as winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award.
From his early appearances on the independent scene in films such as The Road to Guantanamo (Mat Whitecross, Michael Winterbottom, 2006), Four Lions (Christopher Morris, 2010) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mira Nair, 2012), to his mainstream breakthrough with hits like Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards, 2016) and Venom (Ruben Fleischer, 2018), Ahmed has proven able to reconcile the laurels garnered in a high-profile career – not least the Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019) – with deep, ongoing social and political engagement against racism and all forms of intolerance.
Born into a British-Pakistani family, Ahmed has also followed a parallel career in music, making rap another medium for his personal message. That twofold talent is reflected in the work chosen by the actor to accompany this tribute, a movie he also produced and co-wrote: Mughal Mowgli (Mogul Mowgli, 2020) by Bassam Tariq, screening on Thursday, August 3rd at the GranRex. Ahmed subsequently co-wrote, produced and starred in The Long Goodbye (2021) with director Aneil Karia, which accompanied his studio album of the same name. Ahmed and Karia went on to win the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2022. Finally, during the award ceremony on Wednesday 2 August in Piazza Grande, the latest short film he participated in, Dammi (2023) by Yann Mounir Demange, will be premiered.