Asia Argento will be awarded a lifetime achievement award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, which runs from August 5-15. 

Argento will receive the award on the festival’s Piazza Grande stage on August 13. She will also present her latest title, Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Muerte No Tiene Dueño (Death Has No Master), which debuted in Directors Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. 

Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno’s Artistic Director, described Argento as “an artist who has always managed to reimagine what it means to make films, constantly challenging herself and taking personal risks.” 

“Driven by a radical creative calling, through which she has probed the limits and explored the possibilities of cinema, both as an actress and as a director, Asia Argento embodies a vitality, generosity, and restlessness that stands as among the most vivid representations of all that cinema still has to offer,” Nazzaro added. 

As a performer, Argento has worked with directors such as Abel Ferrara (New Rose Hotel, 1998 and Go Go Tales, 2007), Gus Van Sant (Last Days, 2005), George A. Romero (Land of the Dead, 2005), Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette, 2006), and Olivier Assayas (Boarding Gate, 2007). She also starred in many films by her father, Dario Argento, including Trauma (1993) and The Stendhal Syndrome (1996).

Argento has directed her own features, starting with her debut Scarlet Diva in 2000 and most recently Misunderstood (2014). 

In Death Has No Master, Argento plays an immigrant heiress to a colonial cacao plantation in Venezuela. She ventures to the country to claim her inheritance, but she’s forced to confront the land’s current occupants as well as its dark, violent legacy.