U.S. director and artist Harmony Korine, whose films include “Gummo,” “Spring Breakers” and “Beach Bum” – which stars Matthew McConaughey as a stoner poet named Moondog – is being honored by the Locarno Film Festival with its Pardo d’onore Manor lifetime achievement award.
Born in Bolinas, California, in 1974, Harmony Korine broke out in the filmmaking world in 1995 when he wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark’s controversial “Kids.” In 1997 he made his directorial debut with “Gummo,” a realistic look at youth alienation in America, for which he won awards at the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week and at the Rotterdam fest.
In 1998, he directed his first music video for the song “Sunday” by Sonic Youth, starring Macaulay Culkin. The same year Korine published his debut novel “A Crack-Up at the Race Riots.”
Korine’s second feature “Julien Donkey-Boy,” the experimentally told story of a schizophrenic, went to Venice in 199 and was followed in 2007 by “Mister Lonely” and grotesque comedy “Trash Humpers” in 2009. Then came “Spring Breakers” in 2012 and “The Beach Bum” in 2019.
“Harmony Korine is hard to pin down, difficult to categorize as a filmmaker, but he is an artist whose touch is unmistakable in whatever form,” said in a statement Locarno’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro.
Nazzaro went on to praise Korine for being “A rebellious anarchist – both dangerous and poetic in his amused, cultivated radicalism” and said that “Korine redefined the term “maverick” in U.S. cinema, without ever losing the smile on his face or the sheer fun of it all.”
“Now that a key cult movie like ‘Spring Breakers has chalked up its tenth anniversary, giving the Pardo d’onore Manor award to Korine is a celebration of the infinite forms of cinema,” the Locarno chief went on to note.
Korine is expected to be on hand on the Swiss fest’s 8,000-seat Piazza Grande to receive the award on the evening of Aug. 11. He will hold an onstage conversation on Aug. 12. The director has chosen “Gummo” and “Spring Breakers” as his films that will screen as tributes.
Previous recipients of the Locarno award include Samuel Fuller, Jean-Luc Godard, Ken Loach, Sidney Pollack, Abbas Kiarostami, and and Agnès Varda.
The 76th edition of the prominent Swiss fest dedicated to indie cinema will run Aug. 2-12.
