Hong Kong and global film icon Jackie Chan will attend the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland this summer to receive the prestigious Pardo alla Carriera, or Career Leopard award, organizers unveiled on Tuesday.
The festival will bestow the honor upon Chan on the evening of Saturday, Aug. 9, with the actor also set to introduce his films Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985), on both of which he worked as star and director, as part of the tribute to his career.
The festival audience will also have an opportunity to see and hear Chan on Sunday, Aug. 10 during a public conversation event.
Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, highlighted: “Director, producer, actor, screenwriter, choreographer, singer, athlete, and daredevil stuntman, Jackie Chan is both a key figure in contemporary Asian cinema and one whose influence has rewritten the rules of Hollywood cinema. From his years at the China Drama Academy under Master Yu Jim-Yuen, working at a very young age as a stuntman in King Hu’s masterpiece A Touch of Zen, Chan has continually reinvented martial arts cinema and much beyond it.”
Continued Nazzaro: “A pure comic talent, he has absorbed the lessons of Buster Keaton and early cinema as his own, creating masterpieces that have captivated audiences around the world. With a sensibility worthy of the classic musical, he shaped an unprecedented poetics of the human body in motion.”
His conclusion: “In cinema, there is a before Jackie Chan and an after Jackie Chan.”
Locarno called Chan an “Asian megastar, master filmmaker, and Hollywood mainstay beloved for action films that bridged the gap between East and West,” adding that he has “for almost 60 years been one of the world’s most recognizable faces.
After beginning as a child actor in the 1960s, Chan found success in 1978 with Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master. Over the next decade, his “blend of kung-fu comedy was a reliable box-office draw for Golden Harvest, the legendary Hong Kong studio, with his audacious stunts and easy-going charisma drawing legions of adoring fans to cinemas,” Locarno said.
By the 1990s, Chan was Asia’s highest-grossing action star, and a career in Hollywood followed. “The buddy comedy Rush Hour (1998) would cement Chan’s place as a global superstar unlike any before him,” said Locarno.
Chan has also worked behind the camera as the director of the likes of Police Story and Armour of God (1986).
The Pardo alla Carriera is handed out with the support of Ascona-Locarno Tourism, the destination partner of the Locarno festival.
Previous honorees include Francesco Rosi, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Mario Adorf, Jane Birkin, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, and, last year, Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan.
The 78th Locarno festival runs Aug. 6-16.
