The Locarno Film Festival will honor James Gray with a lifetime achievement award at this year’s edition, where the American auteur’s most recent work, “Paper Tiger,” will be screened.

Gray will receive the Pardo alla Carriera award on August 9 and will present “Paper Tiger,” which premiered in May in Cannes, at the festival’s open-air Piazza Grande venue. Set in 1986, the film follows two brothers, Irwin (Miles Teller) and Gary Pearl (Adam Driver). Irwin becomes entangled with the Russian mafia after embarking on a get-rich-quick scheme to clean up the Gowanus Canal, and his former cop brother, Gary, is the only one who can get him out of trouble. “Paper Tiger” will have its North American premiere as the opening night film of the 64th New York Film Festival on September 25.

Two other titles directed by Gray, “We Own the Night” (2007) and “Two Lovers” (2008), will also be screened at Locarno as part of the tribute.

“Since winning the Silver Lion in Venice for ‘Little Odessa’ (1994) at age 25, James Gray has forged a singular career rooted, with penetrating realism, in his upbringing in New York’s Russian Jewish community,” the festival said in a statement, citing Gray’s “The Yards” (2000), “We Own the Night” (2007), “Two Lovers” (2008) and “The Immigrant.” (2013), which cemented Gray’s position “as one of the most artistically distinctive voices in American cinema: a filmmaker concerned with criminal underworlds, depicted in exacting detail, as by meticulous family portraits, often set in the Brighton Beach of his youth and shaped by a dialogue with classic American and European arthouse cinema.”

Locarno’s statement continues: “As he has established himself in the upper echelon of filmmakers in the United States, Gray’s explorations of the often elusive promise of the American dream have expanded, over the past decade, into more varied thematic terrain (colonial exploration, space travel, racial prejudice) that reshaped popular understandings of his work while remaining distinctively his own: ‘The Lost City of Z’ (2016) with Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson, ‘Ad Astra’ (2019) with Brad Pitt and ‘Armageddon Time’ (2022) with Anthony Hopkins.”

Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro added: “James Gray is the last great novelist of American cinema. His films form a rich body of work that echoes the Jewish diaspora, film noir, and Russian and American literature.” He called Gray “a filmmaker with a humanistic sensibility and deep cinephilic knowledge” who “has experimented with genres such as science fiction and adventure while retaining his own artistic identity and voice.”

Previous winners of the Premio Locarno Pardo alla Carriera include Francesco Rosi, Bruno Ganz, Claudia Cardinale, Johnnie To, Harry Belafonte, Jane Birkin, Costa-Gavras, Tsai Ming-liang, Shah Rukh Khan and Jackie Chan.

The 79th edition of Locarno will be held from August 5 to 15.