Hong Kong and international film icon Jackie Chan will attend the 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland this summer time to obtain the celebrated Pardo alla Carriera, or Career Leopard award, organizers unveiled on Tuesday.
The competition will bestow the glory upon Chan on the night of Saturday, Aug. 9, with the actor additionally set to introduce his movies Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985), on each of which he labored as star and director, as a part of the tribute to his profession.
The competition viewers may even have a possibility to see and listen to Chan on Sunday, Aug. 10 throughout a public dialog occasion.
Giona A. Nazzaro, creative 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 known as Chan an “Asian megastar, master filmmaker, and Hollywood mainstay beloved for action films that bridged the gap between East and West,” including that he has “for nearly 60 years been one of many world’s most recognizable faces.
After starting as a toddler actor within the Nineteen Sixties, Chan discovered success in 1978 with Snake within the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master. Over the following 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 mentioned.
By the Nineteen Nineties, Chan was Asia’s highest-grossing motion star, and a profession in Hollywood adopted. “The buddy comedy Rush Hour (1998) would cement Chan’s place as a global superstar unlike any before him,” mentioned Locarno.
Chan has additionally labored behind the digital camera because the director of the likes of Police Story and Armour of God (1986).
The Pardo alla Carriera is handed out with the assist of Ascona-Locarno Tourism, the vacation spot associate of the Locarno competition.
Previous honorees embrace Francesco Rosi, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Mario Adorf, Jane Birkin, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, and, final yr, Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan.
The 78th Locarno festival runs Aug. 6-16.
