The Locarno Film Festival will honor U.S. performance artist, musician and filmmaker Laurie Anderson with its 2022 lifetime achievement award.
The Vision Award, which honors “creative pioneers,” will be presented to Anderson at a ceremony on Locarno’s Piazza Grande on August 10. Anderson will take part in an onstage Q&A on August 11.
In a statement, the Locarno festival praised Anderson, a leading figure in the U.S. avant-garde since the 1970s, as “an artist who has made inventiveness and experimentation the hallmarks of her career … Anderson has spent five decades exploring the potential of multimedia and innovative technology in the arts, through collaborations with William S. Burroughs, John Cage, Philip Glass, Brian Eno, Wim Wenders, Peter Gabriel, Jean-Michel Jarre and Lou Reed, her late great husband, among many others,” the festival said.
Locarno will screen Anderson’s two feature-length documentaries: the restored 4K version of Home of the Brave (1986), a concert film documentary of her four-night epic “United States Life” performance, which blend film, animation, dance, and electronica, and Heart of a Dog (2015), a rumination on her relationship with her beloved terrier Lolabelle, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
“Laurie Anderson in Locarno is a dream come true,” said Locarno’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, who called her “a many-layered personality whose deep, irrepressible creativity has followed countless groundbreaking trails in music, performance, film, theater, electronics, poetry and all the distinct multitudes of her practice.”
The 75th edition Locarno Film Festival runs Aug. 4-14.
