American filmmaker Alexander Payne is set to receive the honorary Leopard award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, the organisers announced on Thursday.
Payne will also present his films The Descendants (2011) and Nebraska (2013), and participate in a public discussion with the festival audience. He is known for beloved films like Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), Nebraska (2013), and most recently, The Holdovers (2023).
“A new name for #Locarno78! Our honorary leopard – the Pardo d’Onore, presented by #Manor – will be given to the internationally recognized and celebrated American filmmaker #AlexanderPayne on August 15, 2025,” the organisers wrote on X.
“Alexander Payne is an erudite auteur with an encyclopedic 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,” Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, said in a statement.
“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,” Nazzaro added.
Previous recipients of the Leopard award include Manoel de Oliveira, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach, Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Terry Gilliam, Alexander Sokurov, William Friedkin, Alain Tanner, Jia Zhang-ke and Leos Carax.
Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda, Michael Cimino, Marco Bellocchio, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jean-Marie Straub, Todd Haynes, Bruno Dumont, John Waters, John Landis, Kelly Reichardt, Harmony Korine, and Jane Campion have also been honoured with this award.
The 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival will be held from August 6 to 16.