The Locarno Film Festival will pay tribute to U.S. director, screenwriter, and actor John Landis, who on Friday August 13 in Piazza Grande will receive the Pardo d’onore Manor award, given each year to an outstanding personality in filmmaking.
“John Landis is a genuine American genius. The all-consuming cinephile passion, slapstick music, irresistible gags and visceral attachment to the B movie ethos, combined with acute critical sensibility and political awareness, made him a key figure in the renewal of American filmmaking between the Seventies and the Nineties. He hybridized horror and comedy, musical and noir, in a way never seen before. The resulting masterpieces captured enthusiastic audiences around the world, drawn by his fresh new filmic language and the challenges to conventional morality. Landis showed that you could do it all and dream it all, and in so doing he made cinema better, fairer, more inclusive.“, said Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival.
On Saturday 14 August at the Forum @Rotonda, Landis will also join a panel discussion with the audience, while Locarno74 will feature screenings of three landmark titles from his career: National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), Trading Places (1983) and Innocent Blood (1992).
Alongside John Landis, his wife, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, will also be in Locarno, holdind a masterclass on costume design on the afternoon of Thursday 12 August.