Filmmaker James Gray will be honored at the Locarno Film Festival with the prestigious Pardo alla Carriera award and present his latest film, Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller.
The festival will also show two titles by Gray – We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008), in the program.
Giona A. Nazzaro, festival artistic director, said, “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. 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.”
Since winning the Silver Lion at Venice for Little Odessa (1994) at age 25, James Gray has forged a singular career rooted in his upbringing in New York’s Russian Jewish community with films like The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008), and The Immigrant (2013).
Over the past decade, he has expanded into more varied thematic terrain – colonial exploration, space travel, racial prejudice – that reshaped the popular understanding of his work while remaining distinctively his own with titles – 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.
In Paper Tiger, which premiered in Competition at Cannes this year and will open the 2026 New York Film Festival, Gray returns to the New York milieu of his early work and to the 1980s of his childhood, following two brothers whose hopes for a better life draw them into the orbit of the Russian mafia.
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, and Andrea Bucko.
Previous winners of the Award have included Francesco Rosi, Claude Goretta, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Peter-Christian Fueter, Sergio Castellitto, Otar Iosseliani, Víctor Erice, Marlen Khutsiev, Bulle Ogier, Mario Adorf, Jane Birkin, Fredi M. Murer, 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, and Gray will receive the award in Piazza Grande on Sunday, August 9, 2026.
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