Los Angeles, May 5 (AHN) Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky is set to be conferred at the upcoming edition of the Locarno Film Festival. He will be feted with the festival’s Honorary Leopard Award.

The prominent Swiss fest dedicated to indie cinema will celebrate the American auteur on August 14 during a ceremony on its 8,000-seat Piazza Grande, reports ‘Variety’.

Aronofsky will also present his films ‘The Fountain’ and ‘Mother’ and take part in an onstage public conversation.

“With era-defining films like ‘Pi’, ‘Requiem for a Dream’, the Venice film festival award-winner ‘The Wrestler’, ‘Black Swan’, ‘Noah’, and ‘The Whale’, for which Brendan Fraser was deservedly awarded Best Actor at the Academy Awards, Darren Aronofsky has carved out a space in contemporary cinema that defies tidy categorisation”, the festival said in a statement.

They added, “By turns provocative, spiritual, and formally daring, his films have for more than a quarter century probed the outer limits of faith, desire, and obsession”.

As per ‘Variety’, Darren Aronofsky’s most recent feature film is the black comedy ‘Caught Stealing’ starring Austin Butler.

He also produced ‘On This Day… 1776’, an animated series that premiered earlier this year which re-creates moments from America’s founding year and used artificial intelligence to travel back in time 250 years ago, but used real-life human actors to provide the voices.

Locarno’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro lavished further praise on Aronofsky calling him “an auteur who has made the sheer force of creativity, invention, and audacity his trademark”.

“As a filmmaker, he has succeeded in creating an unmistakable body of work, so much so that the adjective ‘Aronofskian’ is now used to characterise a deeply personal and unconventional style that nonetheless moves freely between different genres and approaches”, he added.