Isabella Rossellini to receive Excellence Award at Locarno

Locarno Film Festival: Excellence Award to Isabella Rossellini Keystone-SDA

The Locarno Film Festival will present the Excellence Award to Italian-American actor, model and director Isabella Rossellini. She will receive the award on August 5, as part of the opening night of the 79th edition of the event on the Piazza Grande.

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The daughter of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian director Roberto Rossellini, Isabella Rossellini, who began her career as a model, has established herself as “an icon of contemporary cinema, television, and fashion,” a statement said on Thursday. Among her best-known roles on the big screen is that of Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).

In her long career Rossellini, born in 1952, has starred in many films by directors of the calibre of Robert Zemeckis and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.

Among the most recent films in which she has starred are La Chimera (2023) by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, co-produced by Savosa-based Amka Films Productions of Ticino, and Conclave (2024) by Austrian director Edward Berger, who also holds Swiss nationality. For the latter she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

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However, Rossellini has another great passion: animals. In fact, she holds a Master’s degree in animal behaviour and conservation from Hunter College in New York. In Locarno she will present, among others, some of her productions as a director such as the series of short films Green Porno (2008-2009) in which she interprets “animal mating rituals in costume and with deadpan comic genius”, the organisers said.

Festival artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro said Rossellin is “a visionary and incomparable performer and self-deprecating genius whose profound presence has left an indelible mark on contemporary cinema through her boundless talent and deep humanity”.

The 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival will take place from August 5 to 15 .

Adapted from Italian by AI/ts

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