Writer-director Alexander Payne will receive the prestigious honorary leopard award, the Pardo d’Onore at the upcoming 78th Locarno Film Festival taking place from August 6-16, 2025. Payne will also present his films The Descendants and Nebraska and participate in a public discussion with the festival audience.
Alexander Payne’s films is the writer and director behind films like Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), Nebraska (2013), and most recently the celebrated The Holdovers (2023). He has collectively won three Academy Awards, three BAFTAs, and eight Golden Globes in various categories.
In the announcement, the festival said, “Born in Nebraska in 1961, Payne studied filmmaking at UCLA, where his student work drew attention from Hollywood. By 1996, he had written and directed the ingenious politically charged comedy Citizen Ruth, starring Laura Dern, which received major acclaim after premiering at Sundance. From there, Payne went on to realize a remarkable series of seven more feature films, with each distinguished by their elegant construction, biting humor, and extraordinary tragicomic performances from an astounding range of revered actors. For these achievements, the Locarno Film Festival is honored to award its Pardo d’Onore to Alexander Payne.”
Giona A.Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, added, “Alexander Payne is an erudite auteur with an encyclopaedic cinephile knowledge. Gifted with an unerring sense for the bittersweet facets of human comedy, he is a filmmaker with sensibilities at once exquisitely classical and modern. An impeccable director of actors who has worked with such names as Jack Nicholson, George Clooney, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Matt Damon, Bruce Dern, and Paul Giamatti, in Payne we find a knowledge of the savoir-faire of Hollywood cinema, its poetry, and its uniqueness. He’s the author of a unique filmography in which he has always addressed the complexities of the human condition with a smile in a constant dialogue with audiences worldwide.”