China’s Jia Zhang-ke is to become the youngest director ever to receive Locarno’s Leopard of Honour at the forthcoming edition in August.

According to Locarno’s new artistic director Olivier Pere, Jia Zhang-ke, who was born in Fenyang in 1970 and studied at the Beijing Film Academy, is “an exciting filmmaker, who, film after film, with great aesthetic rigour and an innate sense of time and space, offers a unique perspective on the profound changes occurring in contemporary China.”
 
The festival will screen the director’s second feature film Platform from 2000 as well as his latest documentary I Wish I Knew which was shown in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at this year´s Cannes Film Festival.
 
Jia Zhang-ke will be presented with the Leopard of Honour on August 5. A day later, he will hold a masterclass at the Forum.
 
As previously reported, the festival is also bestowing a Leopard of Honour to the veteran Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner.

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