Alfonso Cuarón receives lifetime achievement award at Locarno

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón received the lifetime achievement award on Sunday at the 77th Locarno Film Festival.

“Alfonso Cuarón is a visionary author of agile and liberated imaginaries. Combining an experimental spirit with the sweep of great popular writers, he has managed to capture the imagination and hearts of millions of viewers, passing on the same wonder that he himself experienced as a child and teenager basking in the glow of classic Mexican cinema,” said Giona Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival. “From coming-of-age novels to science fiction, from melodrama to grand sagas like Harry Potter, Alfonso Cuarón has reinvented himself as an artist with each new film, always in the service of the pleasure of cinema, and has thus created a truly multifaceted body of work.”

“It took me a long time to make my first film – I was unsure about writing I think (…). Initially filmmaking was my way of trying to earn money in various positions: from assistant director to editor,” Cuarón said at a panel event during the festival.

His first film “Uno per tutte (Sólo con tu pareja),” from 1991, he made with his brother Carlos. Before Cuarón became a director, there was an oppressive climate in cinema in Mexico, “two films a year were released, but always by already well-known directors. There was no room for young directors, then the situation changed. But at some point he was forced to export his business to the United States.

Staying in Mexico meant making “telenovelas or commercials,” he explained, and that was not what he wanted. “I never planned to go to Hollywood but Sydney Pollack saw my first film and offered me a job in Los Angeles,” he added.

“I never saw my old films after I made them, I prefer to keep the memories,” he said.

Cuarón became the first Mexican to win an Oscar with “Gravity” in 2014 and then in 2019 with “Roma.” Speaking about “Gravity,” the director said that “that film saved my life.” After this film “it was the first moment where I was financially stable and I decided to invest my money for the next film,” he said.

Shooting “Rome” “was creatively interesting but emotionally devastating,” he says. This is his most personal film, and many scenes really happened in his life: it was like “being interned in a sanatorium and undergoing electroshock.” While the film was wildly successful the director did not experience it in the same way as the audience, “I was again going through various adversities in my life, for me success is a complete void,” he explains, “after I finished making the film I completely detached myself from it.”

Cuarón presented Alain Tanner’s film “Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000” (“Jonas who will be 20 in 2000,” 1976) on Sunday that he personally selected for screening at the festival. Of his cinema, he loves the fact that he is interested in “the individual and society and how one shapes the other.” “The starting point has to be the experience of the protagonists and their humanity,” he added.

Adapted from Italian by DeepL/ac

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