Director Luca Guadagnino, Jenny Slate, Bowen Yang to be honored at Provincetown film fest

PROVINCETOWN — Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino will be honored as the “Filmmaker on the Edge” next month by the Provincetown International Film Festival, which will also give Next Wave Awards for distinctive voices to nationally known actors/writers/comedians Jenny Slate and Bowen Yang.

The award choices were announced Thursday along with a slate of close to 80 feature and short films for a return to an in-person festival June 15-19.

Italian filmmaker Guadagnino will accept his award June 19 in a Provincetown conversation with festival resident artist and film director John Waters. Guadagnino’s documentary “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” about Italian designer Salvatore Ferragamo will screen at the festival.

Oscar-nominated director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name”) will be honored as the “Filmmaker on the Edge” next month by the Provincetown International Film Festival.

Also featured in the film lineup will be the world premiere of the Criterion Collection’s 4K restoration of Waters’ classic “Pink Flamingos” to mark its 50th anniversary. The festival will open with Sophie Hyde’s “Good Luck To You, Leo Grande,” starring Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack in a story about a post-marital sexual awakening that will be released on Hulu on June 27; and other spotlight selections will be Sarah Jones’ “Sell/Buy/Date” and Alli Haapasalo’s “Girl Picture.”

For the festival’s honorees, Guadagnino is best known for 2017’s “Call Me By Your Name,” which won and was nominated for multiple awards. Those included Academy Award nominations for Guadagnino, star Timothée Chalamet and best song, and an adapted-screenplay Oscar win for James Ivory.

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Other Guadagnino films include “Suspiria” and “A Bigger Splash,” and he was recently in the news for the MGM’s worldwide-distribution buy of his first U.S.-set film “Bones and All,” also starring Chalamet, and the director’s plans to start filming “Challenger” with Zendaya.

In announcing the choice, festival executive director Anne Hubbell called Guadagnino “a master filmmaker and a perfect example of an artist who pushes the boundaries of their craft.” His work made him a “natural fit” for the award, she said, because “his complex, emotional stories and stunning visuals have left an undeniable mark on cinema.”

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Jenny Slate, an actress, comedian and author who is a Massachusetts native, will receive the Next Wave Award in June at the Provincetown film festival.

In a June 16 ceremony, Slate and Yang will receive the Next Wave Awards, which honor “those who have exciting and distinctive voices, take artistic risks, and have a passionate commitment to independent film” — traits that festival artistic director Lisa Viola said the two “fully embody.”

Yang is best known for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Lost City,” and his new contemporary rom-com film “Fire Island” will play at the festival in a Special Presentation. The movie, out June 3 on Hulu, tells a multicultural story of queerness and romance inspired by Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Bowen Yang, an actor/comedian best known for “Saturday Night Live,” will receive a Next Wave Award from the Provincetown International Film Festival.

Slate’s 2021 film, “Marcel the Shell with His Shoes On,” the feature-length animated story of a 1-inch-tall shell character with a colorful existence that she co-wrote and stars in, will also screen at the festival. Slate’s credits include TV’s “Parks and Recreation,” animated voice work in multiple films, and last year’s Amazon Prime rom-com “I Want You Back.”

Slate is a Massachusetts native with Martha’s Vineyard ties who has been seen locally in recent years as the 2019 eighth-grade graduation speaker for the one student in school on the island of Cuttyhunk (where her now-husband Ben Shattuck runs a writer’s residency) and when the couple later that year read their writing at Provincetown Public Library.

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Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Provincetown film fest honors Luca Guadagnino, Jenny Slate, Bowen Yang