The Locarno Film Festival will present its Raimondo Rezzonico Award to Sigurjón "Joni" Sighvatsson on the evening of Thursday, 6 August, honouring a producer whose credits stretch from David Lynch's Twin Peaks to the 1990s teen touchstone Beverly Hills, 90210. The award, given within the festival's Histoire(s) du Cinéma section, recognises a career that has moved between Hollywood studios, independent film, music video and European art cinema with few pauses along the way (The Hollywood Reporter).

Sighvatsson, born in Iceland and based in the United States, co-founded Propaganda Films in 1986. At its peak the company produced roughly a third of all music videos in the US — a volume that gave it a outsized hand in shaping what MTV-era audiences saw on their screens (The Hollywood Reporter). He is now the principal of Palomar Pictures.

His producing credits read as a map of the past four decades of American film and television. He produced Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990), which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and was a producer on Lynch's Twin Peaks during its original 1990–91 run. He produced Beverly Hills, 90210, Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (1996), and the horror film Candyman, which was based on a short story (The Hollywood Reporter).

Further credits include Kathryn Bigelow's The Weight of Water (2000) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), the French soccer documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) by Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, and a 2022 film about MKUltra — the CIA's covert LSD programme (The Hollywood Reporter).

Locarno will screen Wild at Heart and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait as part of the tribute, which is titled "Always on the Edge" (Locarno Film Festival). The festival's broader 2026 retrospective, "Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist," runs separately within the same edition (Locarno Film Festival).

What makes the tribute unusual is its span. Most producer retrospectives sit inside a single industry — studio features, or television, or music video. Sighvatsson's career has touched all three, plus documentary and European art film, often within the same stretch of years. The Piazza Grande, Locarno's 8,000-seat open-air venue, will hold the ceremony on the evening of 6 August.