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Being invited to participate in the Critics Academy was my first trip to Switzerland. It is a country I had romanticised for its vast scale: the land of CERN and particle collisions, hydroelectric dams and vast lakes. It is where Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity and Tim Burners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. It is where in 1916, following the eruption of Mt Tambora, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft and Lord Byron spent ‘the year without a summer’ under the ashen sky writing ghost stories.

It is the place in Europe most prone to lighting strikes, we were warned. As we drove up the mountains from Milan Malpensa, the clouds started to descend. The roadside was lined with cordyline plants and palms. Everything began to feel tropical and new. The town of Locarno is two hundred meters above sea level and 14.6 millibars lower in barometric air pressure than my home in south east London. That means the atmosphere can become very heavy, and suddenly ripe for a storm.

I was taught to count the number of seconds between the lightning bolt and the thunderclap. One second meant the storm is one mile away, two seconds two, et cetera. We sit down in a pizzeria the evening before the festival begins. The town is empty of cinephiles, just pensioners and holidaymakers alternating between the waterpark, falconeria and casino. With a suddenness that I am unfamiliar with, torrential rain begins to pour. There is no chance to count the number of seconds between the thunder and lightning; the storm is directly above us.

Thunder and lightning, sound and light. It is the first cinema, said the jet-lagged critic who was yet to catch a film. We shared facts about the projection booth in Piazza Grande and the erotic history of the Grand Rex cinema. For all the films I saw throughout the festival, what stuck with me most was the configuration of sound and light in the valley. The town is located on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore. The lake plays tricks on you. The way sound carries over water is disorientating, it makes hunting down parties an event in itself. Locarno straddles the Lugano Prealps and the Lepontine Alps. As the sun rises from behind the mountains it inflames the day and in the evening it sets Cardada ablaze.

Like the mountains, the waves rise and rise. All that crashes down must resurface.

My patchy wifi means watching a film does not always have the thunder and lightning impact it that does on the Piazza Grande. I have said so many prayers to my wifi router I could start a whole religion out of its ineptitude. It has been a funny few months but I’m not going to get into that. There is already so much at stake. I am asked if I’d like to write on Helena Wittman. I missed her films when they showed at the cinema here, so I watch them on my laptop. Helena sends me the links along with warm wishes from Cassis. The films are like postcards. They are very short and say considered, intelligent things. In every film of hers that I’ve seen there are absences — ghosts — that necessite we write: I wish you were here. If you could plug headphones into a postcard you might be closest to what it is like to watch a Helena Wittman film. [...]
- Laura Davis
Full review on the Locarno website.

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

[...]
In continuation to the idea of the body as a canvas for the medium, Somniloquies portrays sleeping nudes against the background of the audio archive of Mike Barr who recorded his roommate’s Dion McGregor’s sleep talking for several years. Vulnerable bodies are exposed as the camera lingers over their most intimate parts. Every now and then limbs emerge from the black, backs curl in a foetal position. No bed can be identified, people seem suspended, as if they are sleeping in a non-place. This is how I imagine Jonah in the belly of the Leviathan. It recalls Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s installation Sleepcinemahotel where the guests who have booked a bed are invited to surrender themselves to a site where films permeate dreams. Sleeping is devoid of intimacy and experiencing a film in togetherness is encouraged in the slipstream of unconsciousness as well as in wakefulness. In a similar act of trust, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s subjects give up control over their bodies to the camera, unable to perform a socially accepted role. Most of the time, their parts are unrecognisable, out of focus and uncomfortably close, as if the camera intends to pierce flesh. As if dreams could be recorded from our insides as well. In the presentation of their incomplete feature, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, competing in Locarno’s initiative The Films After Tomorrow, Véréna and Lucien talk about a gaze inwards that they want to find some form for perceiving the human body. I wonder what they’ll discover. While many dreams are entertaining and eloquent in their reasoning – if there is one in dreams – the ones that best satisfy my voyeuristic curiosity are the unintelligible ones. I try to find similarities to familiar phonetics, fantasise about nightmarish encounters or repressed emotions. Then even the familiar turns unfamiliar.
[...]
- Andreea Patru
Full review on the Locarno website.

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

La Libertad by Lisandro Alonso is a simple, unembellished movie about a lumberjack, played by professional lumberjack Misael Saavdera, though he is never named. For ninety minutes we follow a day in his life. He wakes up, eats, defecates, goes to chop wood, has his lunch, listens to the radio, returns to work, sells wood, cooks dinner. Routine is the plot, and isolation the drama. The only people he interacts with are a guy at the gas station, and a wood-buyer. There isn’t anyone he really talks to, so whatever dialogue there is is between him and the axe, the radio, the stove.

Like Kiarostami films, the scenes in La Libertad are slow and long, linger on the mundane. There is only the mundane in Misael’s day; whether there is magic in it for him or not, we can only guess, but for the viewer: if you stay with it, the film becomes a kind of meditation. Misael’s body lifting and moving the tree trunks, his rhythmic to and fro to the axe’s dutiful strikes. The steel axe beating sound into the world, the trees answering, rustling, the birds harmonizing. Miseal eating a sandwich, patiently and methodically, listening to … a Spanish song? I do not understand the language but its hum comforts. And after a while I am strangely aware of my breath. I forget I am watching a film, I am in Misael’s world, hearing the rumble of the truck beneath him, touching the dog, and when I unforget, I hunger: the landscape is so close and so far, I want to touch it better, taste it more, I am aware of the distance. Then I forget again, and something peculiar happens. In movie frame, Misael has cut the trunks down and laid one of them on the forest ground, he is now slicing it with his axe, sharp horizontal hacks that remove its outer bark and reveal the soft brown underneath. In mind frame, I am in a trance, one with Misael’s monastic mission: transforming the rough tree trunk into a thin, smooth log, whittling away the darker bits… suddenly I am thinking of everything solved and unsolved in my heart.
- Sadia Khatri
Full review on the Locarno website.

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

An editor-in-chief for the mythical La lettre du cinéma — a journal that championed such forgotten French auteurs as Jean-Claude Guiguet and Danièle Dubroux and which also spent many of its pages attempting to unravel the increasingly complex continuities of the nouvelle vague (a subject put aside by the Cahiers of that time) through analysis of the late films of Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette — Axelle Ropert has only released four films since 2004. She is normally associated with a rather particular clique of heterogeneous French filmmakers who collaborate from time to time in each other’s work and who showcase an ample knowledge of the history of cinema through the radiant transparence of their films: Serge Bozon, Pierre Léon, Jean-Charles Fitoussi, Jean-Paul Civeyrac, Vincent Dieutre, et cetera. Ropert’s films, mostly comedies, are, unlike those of most of her peers, classical in the best sense of the term. The fragmentary, elliptical trickery that envelops the majority of contemporary storytelling in cinema is traded for a love of novelistic continuity and a clear outlining of character types that links these films with the ample tradition of the great ancient comedians. Though the way these films inhabit tradition is entirely their own, there is much of Ernst Lubitsch, of Leo McCarey, and of Blake Edwards in them. For instance, in their rejection of emotional ambiguity and its dampness, replaced instead by what one perceives as an evident delight in basking under the clear skies of unbridled — yet always lighthearted — sentiment. Leo McCarey once said, “I love when people laugh. I love when they cry, I like a story to say something, and I hope the audience feels happier leaving the theater than when it came in.” To paraphrase a certain text of Ropert, let’s be ridiculous: I’m sure Leo McCarey would have loved these four films, though his preference would almost certainly be towards Tirez la langue, mademoiselle (2013), her second feature-length work, a doctors’ melodrama.
Full review on the Locarno website.
- Salvador Amores

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

I, always and inexorably I, have had the misfortune and privilege to go through this pandemic in Beirut, Lebanon, where I have been living for the past two years. My abstract and blissfully unaware interest in this tiny Mediterranean country where I ended up living was first triggered by, among other stimuluses, Eric Baudelaire’s 2011 film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images. Having re-watched it recently, I was struck by the director’s ability, in line with the internationalist flavor of the film’s subject, not to exoticize Lebanon and its images. A very rare quality can be found in this and other films by Baudelaire: the disposition to listen rather than pontificate. Even on the stylistic plane, the film is the plastic filiation of an anti-authorial curiosity. The director in fact lends his filmmaking in solidarity to the “landscape theory” of Masao Adachi, filming an imageless story through the Japanese director’s aesthetic postulates. Positing the visibility of power structures in the urban landscape, Adachi had devised a politicized tracking shot that was to visually expose society’s hierarchy and exploitative relations through the filmic image. The most manifest rendition of this technique is to be found in Sekigun-P.F.L.P: Sekai sensô sengen (1971) which Adachi and his co-director Kôji Wakamatsu shot in Beirut on their way back from Cannes. A cinematic call for world revolution and solidarity with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the film mostly consists of long tracking shots of the Lebanese capital and the refugee camps on its outskirts. The same landscape captured by Baudelaire’s tracking shots forty years later substantiates Adachi’s theory as Beirut’s cityscape […]
Full review on the Locarno website.
- Giovanni Vimercati

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

What does waste sound like? Where does it live, where does it travel? Why is it here? You will not find answers to these questions in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest documentary Matter Out of Place (2022). What you will find however, is garbage on beaches, trash on mountains, waste at the bottom of the ocean and matter out of place hidden right under our feet.

This is a film that tries to understand who we are as humans by looking at garbage.

A soda bottle floats down a river. On the shore there are no more pebbles in sight, covered by a carpet of plastic fading in colors. The wind is rustling through the trees that are wearing plastic bags instead of leaves. You can hear birds. Skillfully the waste is wrapping itself around the branches, inclosing its host as if it wanted to take on its shape. The image would seem serene if it wasn’t for all this waste that is just sitting there, aimlessly waiting, slowly suffocating the landscape.

Matter out of place or MOOP for short is a term that describes “any object or impact not native to the immediate environment”. A shapeshifting material and still a mystery to humans, it is being moved from place to place, buried in holes, burnt on beaches or getting stuck somewhere in between. Just like in this riverbed.
Full review on the Locarno website.
- Emily Jourdan

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

Emerging from slumber amidst his funeral bed of roses, Joseph Stalin sits up in a distorted mausoleum amongst World War II’s most notorious figures. Winston Churchill watches from the door whilst an exhausted Jesus lays sleeping. History within this space works backwards and forwards; an incoming Hitler is able to question why this version of Jesus is stuck here and not with his father, and Jesus knows of the Nazi’s defeat. These are the feverish opening moments of Alexander Sokurov’s latest film Skazka (Fairytale, Belgium, Russia, 2022), which manipulates archival footage of the notorious dictators into an endless, purgatorial meeting.

Cinematic depictions of dictators such as Hitler and Benito Mussolini can often sway too far towards the comedic, nullifying the atrocities these men have committed. Sokurov’s portrays them as insecure and narcissistic, but with an uncomfortably sufferable tone. There are no slapstick representations or scenes played for outright laughs. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Churchill exist in multiple forms and outfits, like clusters of fractured egos. The men comment on each other’s smells and complement each other’s clothing, and speak ively aggressively. They obsess over their individual interpretations of religion, repeatedly converging upon a monolithic door to God, where they are continually given the instruction to continue waiting.

The world that Sokurov and his team have built is a nightmarish amalgamation of archival film and photographs, paper-like textures, classical drawings, grain and smoke. These components intermingle at different resolutions, and something in the frame is usually moving with a degree of seasickness. Fused by the film’s claustrophobic score, these elements drift close enough to reality to feel plausible, but inconsistent enough to feel uncanny.
Read more.
- Andrew Northrop

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

After the impressive presentation of her first feature film Drift (2017), the sea and its mysterious surfaces emerge once again as the main characters of Helena Wittman's new film, Human Flowers of Flesh. As its indecipherable yet fascinating title announces, this surprising shape-shifting sea odyssey shot on 35mm film coexists with a series of mysteries threatening us from the very beginning.

As absorbing as it is contemplative, the opening scene of Human Flowers of Flesh follows a bunch of trekkers, a woman and four men, walking silently through the mown rocks of the Mediterranean. The distinctive sounds of the sea surround them, and we are then invited to embark on a marine journey.

Like a sort of speechless Captain Ahab, Ida - impressively portrayed by Angeliki Papoulia, ed for Lanthimos' Canine or The Lobster - leads this ghost crew adrift on in the Mediterranean, a group of silent men from different backgrounds who only seem to find refuge in the tales of a modern-day Aoidos, who eloquently amuses them with mythological fables as they sail.
Read more.
- Manel Domínguez

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

Equipped with a boom mic, a young woman wanders through a mountainous Australian landscape, trying to catch the sounds of the waves. But instead, an unusual encounter draws her into a new world of fantasy and magical realism. This is the opening scene of Petrol, the second feature film by the Australian-Russian filmmaker Alena Lodkina, which premieres today at the Locarno Film Festival in the the Concorso Cineasti del presente section.

This enigmatic drama is centered on Eva, a student of the film school who is searching for a perfect character for her film and finds the charming Mia. Their friendship, however, quickly evolves into a more complicated interrelation of two women that oscillates between reality and imagination, obsession and ignorance.

Through Petrol, Lodkina depicts what it feels to be a film director, to explore landscape, nature, and flora, as well as human relations between family , friends, and lovers. Like Alice in wonderland, the curious Eva strolls in the streets in search of stories and adventures; she is not interested in reality, so she creates her own imaginary world which she leaves only for her regular meetings or Zoom calls with her mom. Mia is her creation, a mirage reflecting her desire for a perfect character. Her gothic outfits and hypnotic behavior recall the enchanting heroines of the old poetry books that Eva reads. The young man to whom she becomes attracted to, looks very much like a ghost from a gothic novel as well: handsome, cold, almost transparent, dangerous.
Read more.
- Sona Karapoghosyan

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

Schlußakkord (1936), one of Douglas Sirk’s German films (signed Detlef Sierck) produced during the Nazi period, presents two inventive lines that often marked the enthusiasm of the studio films of the 1930s: the formal aspiration reminiscent of the various avant-gardes of the 1920s, which still uses the union of shots as a free zone for experimentation, and also, the increasing mobility of the camera as a technological development to be explored to its fullest in sets and scene compositions, pushing the film’s resources to the limit. Sirk stated that, during the making of Schlußakkord, he began “to understand that the camera is the main thing here, because there is emotion in the motion pictures. Motion is emotion, in a way that it can never be in theater” (in Sirk on Sirk by Jon Halliday).

As the title suggests, the music is the heart of the film and unites the narratives that at first are presented quickly and distedly as a series of graceful excerpts. Mr Garvenberg is an orchestra conductor and his wife, Charlotte Garvenberg, disputes the man's attention with music and work. She starts having affairs, and her husband decides to adopt a child as a way of solving the problem. At first disted, the second story concerns a poor young German woman named Hanna who gives her baby up for adoption and emigrates to the United States to live with her husband. After the man's suicide, she returns to in search of the child, who by that point has been adopted by an orchestra conductor.
Read more.
- Gabriel Linhares Falcão

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

The surgical glove is a spectre that haunts Mahesh Narayanan’s Ariyippu [Declaration]. Sterile, blue, and sometimes blood stained – its presence holds together Narayan’s pandemic story of shame and precarity. Each visual encounter with the glove is wrought with meaning. At times it merely serves as a reminder of circumstance and setting: the pandemic and the industries it empowered with a new lease on workers’ exploitation. And then there are moments when the glove creeps upon you – cast over plastic hands protruding from a factory machine, waving at you in an endless mechanized loop; or exhibited over hand shaped sculptures raised in perpetual declaration, decoration pieces for an office reigning over the pandemic factory.

Ariyippu is the story of Reshmi (Divya Prabha) and Hareesh (Kunchako Boban), a married couple from Kerala. They work at a surgical glove factory in Delhi, and they hope to leave their lives behind in India for better prospects abroad. The pandemic is the first catastrophe to strike. It delays the visa process, their ports are handed back to them, empty. And then, a video is leaked. Read more.
- Aiman Rizvi

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

It’s a tale at least as old as the Salem witch trials. Where Arthur Miller looked at the mania that gripped early colonial-era Massachusetts and saw a metaphor for the red scare rippling through the United States of his day, in recent years it is ideas around gender that have driven artists to craft stories about witch hunts, both historical and speculative.

Svetlonoc (Nightsiren), the suspenseful, mist-shrouded second feature from Tereza Nvotová, falls into the latter category. The film centers on Šarlota (the wild-eyed Natalia Germani), a young woman who returns to the mountainous Slovak village from which she fled, together with a childhood swiftly revealed to have been punctuated by trauma, some two decades ago. The homecoming is hardly a joyous one: she is met first by the charred ruins of her mother’s old cabin, then by the cagey glances of the village inhabitants. Certainly, her decision to squat in the haunted cabin next door – in Šarlota’s youth, the residence of a woman said to be a witch – doesn’t help endear her to the superstitious locals.

Only one person seems interested in her arrival: Mira (Eva Mores, evoking Leelee Sobieski in a magnetic screen debut) is a herbalist with a brazen streak, and a relative newcomer to the village herself. Like Šarlota, Mira harbors secrets – but both women reject the burgeoning whispers that their bond is one founded in any kind of sorcery. After all, a proclivity for bathing by moonlight or dancing by fire does not a witch make. Try telling that to the townsfolk, though. Read more
- Keva York

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

“Talk to me,” a woman asks in Balıqlara Xütbə (Sermon to the Fish), the ninth film by Hilal Baydarov. She asks it of the sun and the clouds. She asks it of the wind and the road. Alone in a desolate landscape in Azerbaijan, she cannot ask it of anyone who would be able to speak back.

When her brother returns from the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, it is perfunctory, only in body: psychically, he remains at war. What was once home is, in any case, now void. With the exception of his sister, everyone in the village is dead. He asks his sister to leave the village, to move somewhere else with him. Refusing, the sister weds herself to lifelessness, rot and ruin. He stays, too, continuing to wear his military uniform and conversing with the fallen soldiers who haunt him.

In the forsaken terrain of the film, it is difficult to tell graves from grass. Oil contaminates the lake, the fish – all there is to drink and to eat. Fire is more omnipresent than water, often outnumbering the one or two people in the frame when it burns. Small signs of hope, of vitality – apricot-colored flowers flourishing next to a swirl of paisley on a shawl, leaves like lightly tarnished gold on a tree, the capacity for poetry even in the most desperate circumstance – dwindle by the end of the film. Azerbaijan is rich in both persimmons and petroleum, but petroleum, here, wins out.

In the Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish (written in the mid-seventeenth century by a Portuguese priest), fish swim miraculously to the surface of the water so as to hear the homily of Saint Anthony. In a parallel image by Baydarov, however, fish float to the surface of the lake inanimately, deaf to the poetry that is espoused in the film. While this poetry may alleviate the devastation in the film for the spectator, ultimately this poetry exhausts itself too. Read more
- Laura Staab

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy, a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

The home is a sanctum of peace in Abbas Fahdel’s new work Tales of the Purple House (“Hikayat elbeit elorjowani”). It is here, in this independent house in the south of Lebanon, that Nour Ballouk, Lebanese visual artist and the filmmaker’s wife, spends her days surrounded by canvasses, films and her four cats – Sukker, Antar, Kiwi and Panda. The sun shines down on this quiet haven, the gardens are bountiful and Nour devotes herself to painting nature.

Yet the world is too much with the Fahdels. The Edenic stillness is interrupted by news reports about the 2019 anti-government protests, the 2020 Beirut explosion, the COVID-19 pandemic and, later in the film, the Russian incursion into Ukraine. Moussa, a young Syrian immigrant who visits the Fahdels regularly, is a reminder of the unrest outside, as is the bevy of sanitary workers spraying daily disinfectants in the Fahdel compound.

Like Fahdel’s monumental work Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015) , Tales pits the intimate against the historical, whittling down the world to the size of individuals but also examining the individual as a creature of history. Yet in the new film, the distance between the two is more strained. While the imminent “war” had already become a fact of everyday life in Homeland, the domestic space in Tales is eerily insulated from the tumult outside. Fahdel’s film is about chasm between the here and the elsewhere, the need to carve out a personal space and the desire for political action.

At the heart of Tales is the question of the role of art and artists in the face of existential and political threat. What does it mean to paint trees and flowers and hills and beaches at a time when humankind possibly stands at the brink of extinction? Nour’s paintings may reveal a hidden desire to bask in the permanence of nature – outside time, outside history – a tendency equally found in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky that the Fahdels watch. But as her feline friends demonstrate over and over in the film, there is no escape from the violence in nature. Read more
- Srikanth Srinivasan

This review was created as part of the Locarno Critics Academy , a training program for aspiring film critics aged 18 to 35.

The Locarno Film Festival is known for celebrating the cinema of the past, whether through its historical sidebars, tributes, or its world-famous retrospective. Since 2021, it has also partnered in the restoration of classic films.

Locarno will restore a film as part of a direct partnership with Cinegrell, the world-renowned restoration lab in Berlin and Zurich. But since 2023, it has offered institutions around the world the chance to submit films in need of restoration to its Heritage Restoration Contest. At the next edition of the Festival, a jury of international experts will pick the film most deserving of restoration. In 2023, this was won by Alberto Cavalcanti's Mulher de Verdade and in 2024 by Liliana Cavani's The Year of the Cannibals.

Submissions for the next edition of the contest open until April 29, 2025 at 6pm CET. Apply here.

1. The Year of the Cannibals

   Winner of the Heritage Restoration Contest 2024. Restoration by Cinegrell will premiere at Locarno78 in 2025.

2. Samba Traoré

   Restoration premiered at Locarno77 in 2024.

   Restored for Locarno Heritage by Cinegrell Postproduction GmbH in Zurich.

3. A Real Woman

   Winner of the Heritage Restoration Contest 2023. Restoration premiered at Locarno77 in 2024.

   Restored for Locarno Heritage by Cinegrell Postproduction GmbH in Zurich.

4. The Gate of the Sun

   Restoration premiered at Locarno76 in 2023. Restored for Locarno Heritage by Cinegrell Postproduction GmbH in Zurich.

5. Our Private Lives

   Restoration premiered at Locarno74 in 2021. Restored for Locarno Heritage by Cinegrell Postproduction GmbH in Zurich.

The Pardo d'Oro (Golden Leopard) is Locarno Film Festival's Grand Prize. It rewards the best film in the Concorso internazionale (International Competition).
Considered one of the most prestigious awards in the world of independent cinema, the Pardo d'Oro is a pledge of outstanding quality and excellence. It brings significant recognition and attention from the industry but also from international filmmakers and cinephiles. It can launch or boost a career, and sometimes even change the history of cinema.

1. Toxic
2. Critical Zone

   2023

3. Rule 34

   2022

4. Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

   2021

5. Vitalina Varela

   2019

6. A Land Imagined

   2018

7. Mrs. Fang

   2017

8. Godless

   2016

9. Right Now, Wrong Then

   2015

10. From What Is Before

    2014

...plus 86 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Today, October 10, is #WorldMentalHealthDay, a day dedicated to raising awareness about a vital aspect of many individuals' lives and combatting the stigma surrounding their challenges. To mark this occasion, we invited our Artistic Director, Giona A. Nazzaro, along with his Selection Committee, to curate a selection of 30 films that delve into the theme of mental health.

• Shock Corridor
• We Need to Talk About Kevin
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• The Serpent's Egg
• Oasis
• A Dangerous Method
• Diary of a Schizophrenic Girl
• Images
• Fit to Be Untied

  Screened in Locarno in 1998 for the Retrospective dedicated to Marco Bellocchio.

• Lilith

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival takes place from August 7 to 17, 2024. For more information, visit locarnofestival.ch

1-2: Prefestival Screenings

1-18: Piazza Grande

19-35: Concorso Internazionale

36-50: Concorso Cineasti del Presente

51-90: Pardi di Domani – Concorso Internazionale, Nazionale, Corti d'Autore
51-70: Pardi di Domani: Concorso Internazionale
71-80: Pardi di Domani: Concorso Nazionale
81-90: Pardi di Domani: Concorso Corti d’Autore

91-100: Fuori Concorso

101-117: Open Doors Screenings

118-131: Locarno Kids Screenings

132-157: Histoire(s) du Cinéma

158-200: Retrospettiva Locarno77: The Lady with the Torch, The Centenary of Columbia Pictures

201-210: Panorama Suisse

211-217: Semaine de la Critique

218-219: Special Event

• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

  1

• A Flower of Mine

  2

• The Flood

  3

• Queens

  4

• The Fall

  5

• Electric Child

  6

• A Woman Is a Woman

  7

• Mexico 86

  8

• Sew Torn

  9

• The Seed of the Sacred Fig

  10

...plus 209 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A Christmas list with a twist! Our Artistic Director, Giona A. Nazzaro, has selected 30 films that get you in the festive spirit - some dancing in the glow of twinkling lights, others taking a stroll on the mysterious dark side...

• Gremlins
• Inside
• Batman
• The Day of the Beast
• Die Hard
• Jack Frost
• Catch Me If You Can
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Fatman
• Ghostbusters II

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Embrace the spookiest day of the year! 🎃 Our Artistic Director, Giona A. Nazzaro, has hand-picked 31 of his favourite films: from the bone-chilling to the hilariously hair-raising, there's something for everyone!

• Terrifier 2
• Nosferatu
• Halloween II
• Ouija: Origin of Evil
• The Entity
• The Sadness
• Wolf Creek
• KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park
• Sinister
• A Nightmare on Elm Street

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The 76th annual Locarno Film Festival took place from August 2-12, 2023.

For more information, including ticket information visit locarnofestival.ch

1: Prefestival Screening

2-18: Piazza Grande
2 & 3: Opening Films
17 & 18: Closing Films

19-35: Concorso internationale

36-49: Concorso Cineasti del presente

50-90: Pardi di domani
50-69: Pardi di domani: Concorso internazionale
70-79: Pardi di domani: Concorso nazionale
80-89: Pardi di domani: Concorso Corti d’autore
90: Pardi di domani: Special Event

91-102: Fuori concorso

103-121: Histoire(s) du cinéma

122-157 : Retrospettiva: “Espectáculo a diario – Las distintas temporadas del cine popular mexicano” (Spectacle Every Day – The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema)

158-164: Open Doors: Screenings
165-175: Open Doors: Shorts

176-183: Locarno Kids: Screenings

184-196: Panorama Suisse

197-203 : Semaine de la critique

204 : Special screening in collaboration with LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura

205 : Postfestival Screening

1. Chicken for Linda!
2. Dammi
3. The Falling Star
4. Anatomy of a Fall
5. Antarctica Calling
6. Guardians of the Formula
7. Falling Stars
8. The Beautiful Summer
9. City of Women
10. La Paloma

...plus 195 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For Pride Month, the Locarno Film Festival's Artistic Director, Giona A. Nazzaro, shares 30 of his favourite LGBTQ+ films.

Happy viewing!

• Querelle
• Victim
• Scorpio Rising
• Coming Out
• Desert Hearts
• New Dubai
• Mädchen in Uniform
• Splendori e miserie di Madame Royale
• Poison
• Before I Change My Mind

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Some of the very best in shark cinema 🦈
Compiled by Locarno's Artistic Director, Giona A. Nazzaro.

Safe swimming!

• Jaws
• My Summer with the Shark
• Tiko and the Shark
• Shark
• The Last Shark
• Cruel Jaws
• Deep Blood
• Devil Fish
• The Shark Hunter
• Tintorera: Killer Shark

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In honour of Asian Heritage Month, the Locarno Film Festival's Artistic Director, Giona Nazzaro recommends some of his all-time favourite Asian films.

Don't forget to check the notes to read Giona's comments on each film!

• Center Stage

  “Stanley Kwan’s crowning achievement graced by a vibrant and multilayered Maggie Cheung in a once in a lifetime performance.”

• Street of Shame

  “The master’s final masterpiece, a dolent and somber meditation on what men do to women in the name of… love. Pure cinematic beauty”

• Yi Yi

  “The seasons and the cycles of a Taiwanese middle-class family framed by a wedding and a funeral. The final masterpiece by a director who left too soon.”

• Funeral Parade of Roses

  “A truly subversive film like none other that mixes together different techniques and reinvents the oedipal myth. Set in the world of trans actors and drag queens it is an exhilarating and visually intoxicating ride”

• Goodbye, Dragon Inn

  “A love letter to film and cinema and certainly a film that lingers in the eyes for a very long time.”

• Farewell My Concubine

  “The late Leslie Cheung at his most complex peak directed faultlessly by Chen Kaige. A stunning feat”

• Cruel Story of Youth

  “Nagisa Oshima at his Godardian best. Politically charged, erotic and free, it announces the coming of a filmmaker who would never cease to ruffle the feathers of the establishment.”

• Peking Opera Blues

  “A triumph of genius-like filmmaking with an ending that never ceases to strike awe in any viewer lucky to discover this gem.”

• Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors

  “Early but already accomplished HHS, his world is already in this film but - as we know – the story would take a different turn.”

• Three Times

  “Three dreams weaved together by Mark Lee Ping-bin’s magnificent camerawork that explores Taiwan’s different epochs. Sheer beauty”

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Alberto Lattuada. A popular, cultured and experimental filmmaker, he tackled all genres, contributed to the debut of Federico Fellini and discovered actresses such as Jacqueline Sassard, Catherine Spaak, Nastassja Kinski and Clio Goldsmith. He was a true protagonist of 20th century film culture.

The retrospective dedicated to Alberto Lattuada is curated by Roberto Turigliatto in collaboration with Cinémathèque suisse and Italy’s Cineteca Nazionale – Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Fondazione Cineteca Italiana and Istituto Luce- Cinecittà.

• 12 Directors for 12 Cities

  Genova

• Anna
• White Sister
• Stay as You Are
• Heart of a Dog
• Sweet Deceptions
• Fanciulle in fiore
• The Betrayal
• Giacomo l'idealista
• Love in the City

  Gli Italiani Si Voltano

...plus 31 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For 20 years, Open Doors has been championing filmmaking from regions where independent cinema is especially challenging, building bridges for collaboration across regions, countries and continents. Through Open Doors' public and professional programs we aim to provide a space where talents find in every step of their creative and professional journey and where discussion and reinvention of today’s cinema can happen among free voices.

Open Doors 2022-2024: Focus on Latin America and the Caribbean
For three years, Open Doors will be dedicated to film projects and talents from the following regions and countries:

Central America (Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua)
the Caribbean Islands (Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines)
and South America (Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Venezuela)
The professional and public programs of Open Doors take place during the Locarno Film Festival and year-round, onsite and online.
Read more about them here: www.locarnofestival.ch/LFF/pro/projects/open-doors.html

• If Only I Could Hibernate

  Mongolia – Open Doors Projects’ Hub 2019

• In Flames

  Pakistan – Open Doors Consultancy 2020

• Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

  Vietnam – Open Doors Projects’ Hub 2020

• Tiger Stripes

  Malaysia – Open Doors Projects’ Hub 2019

• Joyland
• Autobiography
• Glorious Ashes
• The Colonel's Stray Dogs
• Day After…
• Discount Workers

...plus 81 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"(...) Cinema – the language of cinema – is the infrastructure of how we communicate, at work and in our daily lives. The forms of filmic narration have become the syntax of the way we imagine the world and social relations.

The Locarno Film Festival is therefore tasked with ensuring that cinema in all its forms continues to be the core of our work. Cinema is the heart of what we do and how we are, even as everything changes. And our way of “being a festival” will have to change, too, as we learn to welcome the cinema of tomorrow.

To imagine the future as a series of linear events is naive. Like the word, the image changes, inexorably. Recent events have reminded us only too clearly that filming and recording involve choosing sides.

The selection of films that we have put together, after watching and appraising over 3,000 titles (of every length and format), is intended to be the mark of a time and of a cinema in motion. A historic time that is moving in multiple directions simultaneously, and a cinema that is probing the issues facing the world, and how to live in it responsibly, sustainably. The image is a witness and a declaration of solidarity. Even when it stings, when it burns.
To learn, tirelessly, to watch together, means to take up the conversation again, to rediscover the meaning of our communities, which is the fundamental lesson of cinema as Rossellini saw it.
The Locarno Film Festival is a bastion of auteur cinema. Of young and emerging cinema. Of cinema that has yet to be. Of young filmmakers taking their first steps. Of the Pardi di domani – the Leopards of tomorrow that represent the most exciting showcase of contemporary cinema in the world.

The films selected, which we invite you to discover, are marked by the strong, self-aware creativity of a living art, up to speed with the times, not looking back over its shoulder, but with a gaze set firmly on the future. Cinema in the present indicative.

Picking the titles in the various competitions and sections was a protracted, complex task, carried out with ion and dedication by the selection committee, whose responded with irable generosity, drawing on their many years of study and the skills and knowhow acquired on the ground by dint of constant effort and boundless ion.

We hope you will us on this new journey of cinematic discovery. Rarely has the moving image seemed to us so rich in potential for the future. The Locarno Film Festival is the ideal place to share that conviction."

Giona A. Nazzaro
Artistic Director, Locarno Film Festival (2022)

• Stella in Love
• Ariyippu
• Sermon to the Fish
• Saturn Bowling
• At Night All the Cats Are Black
• The Adventures of Gigi the Law
• Human Flowers of Flesh
• Il pataffio
• Matter Out of Place
• Tommy Guns

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Locarno Film Festival's Concorso Cineasti del presente offers a selection of first and second feature films, primarily world premieres, directed by emerging global talents.
It’s the place devoted to the discovery of tomorrow’s cinema, which deserves to be ed beyond all genre distinctions.

• Astrakan
• A Perfect Day for Caribou
• Arnold Is a Model Student
• Before I Change My Mind
• Sister, What Grows Where Land Is Sick?
• It Is Night in America
• Fragments From Heaven
• Love Dog
• Slaughterhouse
• Our Lady of the Chinese Shop

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The Concorso Cineasti del presente offers a selection of first and second feature films, primarily world premieres, directed by emerging global talents.
It’s the place devoted to the discovery of tomorrow’s cinema, which deserves to be ed beyond all genre distinctions.

• Actual People
• Public Toilet Africa
• Brotherhood
• Virgin Blue
• The Legionnaire
• Whether the Weather Is Fine
• Our Eternal Summer
• My Brothers Dream Awake
• Mostro
• No One's with the Calves

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The film industry has faced epoch-defining changes over the past eighteen months. Everything has changed. Starting with our notion of ourselves as a society that lives through epoch-making changes merely as reflections of transformations that happen to “others”. Our relationship with images has accelerated even more quickly towards forms of atomized, individualistic consumption. The exceptionalism of the cinema, its event status, has been dramatically diminished by the impossibility of going out at all, let alone crowding in front of a screen. As a result, cinema’s right – even its very ability – to go on existing has seemed at stake. And yet the cinema, like all truly necessary human activities, not only did not bend, but has stood firm against the shock of the ever more rapid changes in consumption patterns within the industry brought on by the pandemic.
As we prepared for the 74th Locarno Film Festival, we were soon able to clear up one popular misconception: that there wouldn’t be enough titles available to mount a strong, motivated, generous, and competitive edition. On the contrary, rarely have we been so sorry about the many titles we were obliged to put aside. Cinema – faced with a tragedy of historic dimensions – not only took up the challenge but has successfully turned it into the tale of how we – all of us together – have overcome it.

While selecting the films you will discover from 4 to 14 August, our efforts were focused on broadening the horizon of the possible. Avoiding the temptation to follow the beaten paths, keeping our eyes open for films from hemispheres, latitudes and economies at opposite poles, tracking developments in young cinema and – above all – rethinking our relationship with the audience in Locarno and the audiences beyond the borders of our city and region. To be a Festival that opens itself up, inclusive and sustainable, that can address the complex problems generated by the historic moment we are going through, without lapsing into narcissistic elitism. Cinema today – more than ever – has expanded its reach via strategies and modalities of consumption that are netlike but highly fragmented. No period before our own has experienced such vast and far-reaching distribution of cinema, yet neither has any period witnessed the dominance of the industry in such forms so acutely threatened. As a result, we find ourselves facing – to take the argument to extremes – the possibility that the cinema itself might disappear, at the very peak of its existence as form, network, memory, archive and lingua franca of our shared imagination. Against that, the Locarno Film Festival remains determined to restore dignity and visibility to the cinema community and its countless stories. Our hope is that the films we have picked will offer the curious, enthusiastic, open-minded and the casual viewer some clues to a world (of images, cinema, film industry) still finding its feet and equipping itself to face the next century in its history.
One thing we have no doubt about whatsoever is that the names picked out for this 74th Locarno Film Festival will be talked about again, for years to come. They are names that will soon be part of our community.

Enjoy cinema, enjoy the films, and Viva Locarno!

Giona A. Nazzaro
Artistic Director, Locarno Film Festival (2021)

• After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
• The River
• The Sacred Spirit
• The Student
• The Giants
• A New Old Play
• Juju Stories
• Secret Name
• Cop Secret
• Luzifer

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Douglas Sirk. A filmmaker rediscovered and much ired by the French New Wave, as well as by directors such as Rainer W. Fassbinder and Bernardo Bertolucci.

Renowned for the melodramas he made for Universal in Hollywood, a director whose career ran through the history of the 20th century, sealing a European sensibility, formed by early experience in German theater, with German expressionist cinema and the codes and production values of the Studios system.

The Retrospective dedicated to Douglas Sirk is curated by Bernard Eisenschitz and Roberto Turigliatto and with the collaboration of Cinémathèque française and Cinémathèque suisse.

Among the guests of the Retrospective in Locarno there was Todd Haynes to present Imitation of Life (1958) in Piazza Grande, as well as to introduce All That Heaven Allows (1955), and his film largely inspired by Sirk’s work Far From Heaven (2002).

The Retrospective is marked by the book Douglas Sirk, né Detlef Sierck, written by film historian Bernard Eisenschitz and published by Les éditions de l’Œil.

• Two Greyhounds
• Final Accord
• All I Desire
• All That Heaven Allows
• The Court Concert
• Hitler's Man
• Imitation of Life
• Lured
• No Room for the Groom
• Schlussakkord

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Another new film in our SHORTS calendar just dropped: Canard (2023) by Elie Chapuis is now streaming for free on our website until July 11.

→ Watch it now on our website

Shown at Locarno in 2023, Canard tells the story of Vladimir and Olga, a couple living on a remote farm in the Swiss countryside. They wish to become parents, but their dream soon turns into a disturbing nightmare.

Our honorary leopard – the Pardo d’Onore, presented by Manor – will be given to the internationally recognized and celebrated American filmmaker Alexander Payne during Locarno78, on August 15, 2025.
 
Payne will also present his films The Descendants (2011) and Nebraska (2013), and participate in a public discussion with the Festival audience. 
 
→ Read more on our website
 
Author of a unique filmography, Alexander Payne has always addressed the complexities of the human condition with a smile in a constant dialogue with audiences worldwide — Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director
 
THE VOICE BEHIND A SLATE OF DRYLY FUNNY MODERN CLASSICS
The distinctive voice behind a slate of dryly funny modern classics, this writer-director has secured his place on the short list of filmmakers whose work can be said to define American cinema in the 21ˢᵗ century. His films have collectively won three Academy Awards, three BAFTAs, and eight Golden Globes in various categories, including for their memorable performances, and exemplify the pleasures of mid-budget filmmaking for grown-ups – a besieged artform ever in need of defense.
 
He's the writer and director behind beloved films like Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), Nebraska (2013), and most recently the celebrated The Holdovers (2023).
 
MADE IN NEBRASKA IN 1961
Born in Nebraska in 1961, Payne studied filmmaking at UCLA. By 1996, he had written and directed the ingenious politically charged comedy Citizen Ruth, starring Laura Dern, which received major acclaim after premiering at Sundance. From there, Payne went on to realize a remarkable series of seven more feature films, with each distinguished by their elegant construction, biting humor, and extraordinary tragicomic performances from an astounding range of revered actors.
 
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The Pardo d’Onore has, since 2017, been made possible thanks to the of Manor, Event Partner of the Locarno Film Festival. Over the years, our honorary leopard has been awarded to some of the most outstanding personalities in cinema.

We’re excited to announce that Lucy Liu will be honored with the Career Achievement Award at Locarno78, on August 14, 2025. With a career spanning over three decades – from her iconic roles in Kill Bill, Charlie’s Angels, Chicago, Set It Up, and Presence – Liu continues to redefine what it means to be a leading woman in Hollywood.

→ Discover more on our website

A master of reinvention, Lucy Liu has consistently delivered powerful performances that challenge the status quo. It’s a true privilege to host her on the Piazza Grande — Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director

AN ICONIC STAR OF FILM AND TELEVISION
Liu is also a celebrated visual artist and recipient of the Harvard University Arts Medal (her mixed-media paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide).

And it doesn't end there: as a UNICEF Ambassador, Liu’s humanitarian efforts have earned her prestigious accolades, including the Women’s World Award. She also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

With an unwavering commitment to pushing creative and cultural boundaries, Liu continues to inspire across all mediums – from film and television to art, literature, and humanitarian work. 

PREMIERE NIGHT: ROSEMEAD WITH LUCY LIU ON PIAZZA GRANDE
Following the award ceremony, Liu will present the international premiere of Rosemead (2025), directed by Eric Lin, alongside the film’s cast and crew on the Piazza Grande. The following day, she’ll engage in a public discussion with the Festival audience at the Forum @Spazio Cinema.

In Rosemead – a gripping drama inspired by true events – Liu portrays an ailing woman racing against time to protect her son from his violent obsessions. In addition to starring in the film, Liu also serves as a producer.

We're thrilled to announce that the Locarno Film Festival and Cinegrell have just restored Roberto Rossellini's Anno uno!

Locarno78 will host the premiere of the newly 4K restored version of Rossellini's penultimate film – a true classic –, thanks to Locarno Heritage (Locarno Pro) and our partnership with Zurich and Berlin-based film lab Cinegrell.

In Anno uno, Rossellini – one of the greatest masters of cinema – traces ten crucial years of Italian history, from 1944 to 1954, through the figure of Christian Democrat statesman Alcide De Gasperi and his efforts to lead the country in the years following the Liberation. Most of the dialogues in the film are direct quotes from historical documents, and this contributes to Anno uno's immense significance in portraying Italy and its politics in the post-World War II era.

→ Discover more on our website

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Anno uno's international rights are handled by Coproduction Office on behalf of rightsholder Minerva Pictures and Cinecittà. A copy of the new restoration will be preserved at the Cinémathèque suisse.

We’re excited to announce that Emma Thompson will receive Locarno78’s Leopard Club Award on the night of August 8, on the occasion of the premiere of the much anticipated thriller The Dead of Winter by Brian Kirk.

Academy, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Emmy Award-winning, Thompson is one of the UK’s most recognizable and beloved actors, with a career in acting, writing, and producing that spans both television and film – from independent features to major blockbusters.

We look forward to honoring the talent of this artist who has moved us, made us think, entertained us, and – most importantly – never ceased to surprise us.

→ Read more on our website

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The Leopard Club is the official ing association of the Locarno Film Festival. It presents the Leopard Club Award each year to an individual whose work in the film industry has left its mark on the collective imagination.

Starting today – with our new project SHORTS – we’ll spotlight a short film every two weeks; and our first pick is iNTELLIGENCE, by Jeanne Frenkel and Cosme Castro – now available to stream for free on our website (until June 28)!

→ Watch it now on locarnofestival.ch

Shown at Locarno in 2023, this short film offers a taste of what’s to come: bold, inventive, kicking open the doors of possibility for cinema in just 14 minutes. Featuring Vincent Macaigne – known for his charming comic performances in films by Olivier Assayas and Emmanuel Mouret – iNTELLIGENCE creatively blends live action and animation in a single blur of visual styles, a real treat to sit back and absorb.

Hope you enjoy the movie!

Shorts can be the spark that lights a filmmaker’s career ablaze. But many filmmakers find their shorts slipping from view even after high-profile festival runs. We’re taking small steps to change that, launching a digital showcase on our website called SHORTS.

Starting on May 29, 2025, every two weeks for the rest of the year Locarno will put the spotlight on one short film from a recent edition of the Pardi di Domani (each short will be available for 30 days).

Shown at Locarno in 2023, our first pick is iNTELLIGENCE by Jeanne Frenkel and Cosme Castro featuring Vincent Macaigne – known for his charming comic performances in films by Olivier Assayas and Emmanuel Mouret. iNTELLIGENCE creatively blends live action and animation in a single blur of visual styles, a real treat to sit back and absorb.

→ Discover more on locarnofestival.ch

Guess what? BaseCamp is back during Locarno78 (August 6 – 16, 2025)! For 11 days, each August BaseCamp brings together 200 emerging talents – filmmakers, designers, musicians, writers, performers, and thinkers – to live, create, and exchange ideas under one roof in Locarno.

It’s a temporary community: part workspace, part meeting ground, where disciplines blend and collaboration happens organically.

→ Discover more and apply at festivalbasecamp.ch

Since 2019, BaseCamp has been a vibrant laboratory within the Locarno Film Festival, combining residency, research, and collective practice to connect Swiss and international creatives.

Storytelling Through the Lens: apply by June 5, 2025 to our photography workshop led by renowned photographer Sven Creutzmann, and produced in collaboration with Manawa Foundation.

Eight young talents will be able to explore their creative potential, improve and experiment as portrait photographers, and engage with other artists and professionals attending Locarno78 (August 6 – 16). There is no fee to attend the workshop.

The eight participants selected for this workshop (by Locarno Factory) will dive into an in-depth experience of the Locarno Film Festival, with a dynamic combination of lectures, individual photography practice, one-on-one sessions with Sven Creutzmann, and meetings and events alongside participants from the Locarno BaseCamp and the Locarno Academy.

→ Discover more and apply on our website

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Photos © Sven Creutzmann

Cinema is changing. What can we even call ‘real’ in today’s media landscape? And how can cinema make sense of it?

REAL: Reality Exploration Academy of Locarno – by Locarno Factory – is a ten-day program (August 6 – 16, 2025, during Locarno78) that brings together cutting-edge audiovisual research and creative practices to explore how reality is represented, questioned, and reimagined on screen.

→ The applications for the REAL are now on our website. Make sure to submit yours by June 2, 2025.

A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY TO REFLECT ON CONTEMPORARYMEDIA REALITIES 
Bringing together the rigors of theory and the energy of the film industry, REAL offers a unique space for dialogue between scholars and filmmakers, inviting participants to reflect critically on the contemporary media realities. This is an important chance to debate these questions right at the heart of one of the world’s most significant film festivals.

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
This is the only program at the Locarno Film Festival awarding ECTS credits (up to 6), making it a unique opportunity for Bachelor, Master, and PhD students, as well as emerging filmmakers who want to deepen their theoretical reflection on the real. REAL embraces an innovative approach that incorporates video essays as practice-based research, utilizing Locarno Film Festival as a laboratory environment for both study and creation.

IF SELECTED, WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE REAL ACADEMY?
Ten unforgettable days of ideas, images, and inspiration at one of the world’s most iconic film festivals, including lectures with leading scholars and filmmakers, access to the Future of Reality conference (August 11 – 12), and creation of a video essay under the expert guidance of the program's mentors.

IN COLLABORATION WITH THE UNIVERSITÀ DELLA SVIZZERA ITALIANA
Organized in collaboration with distinguished professors and researchers at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) – including Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts –, REAL builds on the legacy of the successful Documentary Summer School after 25 editions with a new reimagined format for the 26ᵗʰ, designed to challenge perspectives and propose new ways to navigate the evolving landscape of non-fiction media.


→ Discover more and apply on our website

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REAL is part of the Locarno Film Festival’s Future of Cinema project.

Cover | Ph. © Locarno Film Festival | Ti-Press

The internationally acclaimed Cambodian filmmaker, chronicler of his country’s traumas and gradual social recovery, will serve as jury president of the Concorso Internazionale, overseeing the process that will decide the winner of the Pardo d’Oro – the Golden Leopard – at the 78ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival this August.
 
Acclaimed around the world for his investigations into Cambodian history both during and after the years of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, Rithy Panh is one of contemporary cinema’s most courageous and consistent defenders of artistic freedom and an indefatigable champion of the power of historical truth.

Rithy Panh is widely regarded as a key figure in twentieth-century cinema. His gaze has reinvented the forms of contemporary filmmaking, creating a historiography in images that has exerted an incalculable influence on countless film directors. As an authoritative witness of our time, his ionate search for truth, his anti-dogmatic approach, and his genuine commitment, as well as his capacity to move freely between the numerous forms of present-day film-making were the crucial elements that prompted us, spontaneously and enthusiastically, to offer him the task of President of the Jury of the Concorso Internazionale at the 78th Locarno Film Festival. His artistic freedom and prolific, inexhaustible creativity make Mr. Rithy Panh the ideal figure to whom we can entrust those films, thus preparing them for the encounter with audiences from all over the world — Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director

Since 1994, his feature films have been acclaimed around the world, giving voice to those whose lives were destroyed through horrifying state violence. His most recent film, Meeting with Pol Pot (2024), starring Irène Jacob and Grégoire Colin, debuted last year at the Cannes Film Festival to considerable acclaim.

Cinema preserves history, influences mindsets, and provides a space for reflection and escape. If we've patience, cinema rewards us with its grace — Rithy Panh

→ Read more on our website

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Ph. © Bophana Center

The Locarno Residency (by Locarno Factory) is a unique opportunity for emerging filmmakers to receive vital and hands-on expertise to develop their first feature film.

→ Submissions for the 2025 edition are now open: apply now on our website. Deadline: June 3, 2025 at 14 pm CEST.

A PLACE OF DISCOVERY FOR NEW TALENTS
The Locarno Residency aims to offer and guidance in what is an important key rite of age for many filmmakers: their first feature. The Locarno Film Festival has always stood out as a place of discovery for new talents, and in line with its mission intends to offer young filmmakers an opportunity to receive assistance in developing a full-length feature, in the shape of online sessions and in-person group discussions.

WHAT TO EXPECT: PHASE ONE
Phase one of the initiative is open to ten participants – selected by the artistic team of the Locarno Film Festival on the basis of the film projects submitted and the career profiles – and will take place during the 78ᵗʰ edition of the Festival, from August 6 to 9, 2025.
The ten selected talents will be able to discuss their film concepts with a jury of three film industry personalities, who will then pick out three projects: two international and one Swiss.

PHASE TWO
For the three people selected for phase two, a one-year mentoring course is planned (between 2025 and 2026), which consists of online and in-person sessions. The first in-person session will take place in winter in Venice, at the prestigious Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, in collaboration with the Consulate of Switzerland in Italy. The second phase will follow in spring in Arles, in collaboration with the LUMA Foundation, with participants hosted in the evocative Parc des Ateliers.

The Locarno Residency will cover accommodation and travel expenses and a contribution towards meals.

→ Discover more and apply on our website

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The Locarno Residency will cover accommodation and travel expenses and a contribution towards meals.

The 4K restoration of Samba Traoré, a beguiling masterpiece from Burkina Faso by the great Idrissa Ouédraogo, is now free to watch on our website for a month. This gem of African cinema – newly restored thanks to the Locarno Film Festival and Cinegrell – was last year selected as one of the ten best restorations of 2024 by Film Comment Magazine and, in 2022, one of the 10 greatest films of all time by none other than Luca Guadagnino.

→ Watch the film now on our website

Shortly after winning the Grand Prix at Cannes with Tilaï (1990), Burkinabe writer-director Ouédraogo followed up that dazzling work with the remarkable Samba Traoré in 1992, winning the Silver Bear at the Berlinale. This "moral thriller, more crime and history than crime and punishment" (Filipe Furtado) is about a man returning to his village with a suitcase of stolen cash, and the spiralling consequences of his deception as to its origin.

But it's also, in a direct yet poetic way, about the conflicts between city and rural life, modernity and tradition in Burkina Faso. Gina Telaroli, writing for Film Comment, called it a "taut study of guilt", while Sight & Sound asserted that Ouédraogo's "contribution to the cinema was monumental". Indisputably one of the essential films of the '90s, Ouédraogo's masterpiece has finally been restored to a state that befits its greatness, enabling its continued appreciation around the world.

Now free to watch until June 6, this extraordinary work was painstakingly restored in 4K and presented at the 77ᵗʰ edition of our Festival thanks to Locarno Pro’s Heritage Online program (and to the unparalleled expertise of our long-standing partner Cinegrell). It is made available online as part of our ongoing commitment to making our restorations of heritage cinema freely accessible around the world.

The 78ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival is fast approaching. Accreditation requests for Industry, Press, Professionals, and Locarno Network are now open!

From August 6 to 16, Locarno will once again offer a unique experience of cinema and artistic discovery, with screenings, events, talks, and guests from around the world. The deadline for online accreditation requests is August 1, 2025 at 12 am CEST. Requests submitted after July 27 will be subject to a late fee (except for Locarno Network requests).

→ Get yours now on our website

Industry | Do you work in the film industry? With the Industry Accreditation, you can watch all Festival films through regular screenings, Industry screenings, and the Digital Library, while staying up to date on Locarno Pro activities and taking part in networking and business opportunities.
Thanks to the Online Only option, you can also follow the Festival remotely and access recorded content from Industry activities and events.
– Regular Fee » CHF 160
– Late Fee » CHF 190

Press | The entire Festival minute by minute! With the Press Accreditation journalists, photographers and other professionals in the field will be able to attend press screenings, follow the press conferences, receive updates on the edition, and access the press services available in Locarno.
– Regular Fee » CHF 50
– Late Fee » CHF 80

Professional | Watch all the selected films and don't miss out on meetings with special guests, Q&As, public talks, roundtables, and more. If you want an all-round festival experience, the Professional Accreditation is for you.
– Regular Fee » CHF 100
– Late Fee » CHF 140

Locarno Network | Locarno Network stands at the intersection of culture, politics, and private companies, a meeting point for business professionals at the Locarno Film Festival. This accreditation, which can either be added on to an existing professional or bought independently, offers a suite of tangible benefits to facilitate exchange during the Festival.
– Standalone » CHF 500
– Professional + Network » CHF 600

→ Discover more on our website

Thanks to the of Ibermedia, in 2025 the Industry Academy (by Locarno Pro) will host several editions in Latin America, aimed at Ibero-American professionals: Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia in the first semester; and Chile in the second one (we’re also working to make it happen in Brazil as well – still to be confirmed).

The selection process for the editions in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Colombia has just finished. But the second open call (for the Industry Academy in Chile) is now open.

→ Apply now on locarnofestival.ch by May 26, 2025. Results will be announced in mid-June.

August 18 – 22, 2025, in Santiago de Chile, as part of the 21ˢᵗ edition of the Santiago International Film Festival (SANFIC).

The Chile Locarno Industry Academy, organized by Storyboard Media, is ed by the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of Chile. Moreover, we're very happy to be working with SANFIC for the first time!

SANFIC Industria is a space for the development and promotion of Chilean and Ibero-American cinema, held during the Santiago International Film Festival, one of
the most important festivals in the region.

→ More info on our website

The Industry Academy is an intensive training program designed to and guide young film industry professionals working specifically in the field of independent cinema.

The workshop acts as a shortcut for a new generation of professionals entering the independent film industry, fostering their development and helping them better understand industry challenges while expanding their network.

An Asian megastar, master filmmaker, and Hollywood mainstay beloved for action films that bridged the gap between East and West, Jackie Chan has for almost sixty years been one of the world’s most recognizable faces. The Locarno78 Pardo alla Carriera will be given to this iconic performer and filmmaker on August 9, during the 78ᵗʰ edition of the Festival (August 6 – 16, 2025). The Festival’s prestigious career achievement award is presented by Ascona-Locarno Tourism.

After having got his start as a child actor in the 1960s, Jackie Chan’s blend of kung-fu comedy was a reliable box-office draw for Golden Harvest (the legendary Hong Kong studio) throughout the '70s and '80s, with his audacious stunts and easy-going charisma drawing legions of adoring fans to cinemas.

By the '90s, Jackie Chan was Asia’s highest grossing action hero. Within a few years, the buddy comedy Rush Hour (1998) would cement Jackie's place as a global icon unlike any before him. His career behind the camera, as a director of classics like Police Story (1985) or Armour of God (1986), adds further nuance to the image of this distinctive and idiosyncratic artist.

Jackie Chan has continually reinvented martial arts cinema and much beyond it. A pure comic talent, he has absorbed the lessons of Buster Keaton and early cinema as his own, creating masterpieces that have captivated audiencesaround the world — Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director

As part of the tribute, Chan will also introduce his films Project A (1983) and Police Story (1985), both directed and starring himself. Plus, the audience will have an opportunity to meet Chan on August 10 in a public conversation.

→ Read more on our website

Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans designs the official poster for the 78ᵗʰ edition of the Locarno Film Locarno (August 6 – 16, 2025).

The official poster for Locarno78 depicts a leopard on a tree branch amid an acid trance of yellow and purple abstraction. This is the latest iteration of the Locarno Film Festival's poster, exclusively created by the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, internationally regarded as one of the most influential and prolific artists of our time.

On the glass window of my old color laser photocopier I brought together a photograph of a leopard lying on a tree, which I had taken in Kenya seven years ago, with two fake leopard fur mittens, which I had sewn myself as a sixteen years old teenager — Wolfgang Tillmans

Tillmans produced the poster for the Festival using his experimental Xerox technique, which lends the image a blurry texture and allows him to approach composition through the lens of early digital abstraction. Combined with its psychedelic color palette, the poster is both a throwback to ‘80s and ‘90s iterations of the Locarno posters – which were often impressionistic and themselves bordering on abstraction – as well as a bold reimagining of the visual landscape in which the cinema world’s most famous leopard finds itself. 

→ Take home a holographic print of the official poster for Locarno78, designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Available to pre-order now on our online store: shop.locarnofestival.ch

Locarno triumphs at the 2025 Swiss Film Awards! Last Friday March 21, Queens (Reinas) by Klaudia Reynicke, winner of the Prix du Public UBS at Locarno77, won the Best Feature Film at the Quartz Awards (Schweizer Filmpreis), the top honor for filmmaking in Switzerland. This major win affirms the film's continuing significance for audiences around the world – especially in Peru and in Switzerland, Reynicke's two home countries – and shows that Locarno continues to be the place where Swiss film flourishes.

And it didn't stop there! There were also prizes for some of the most essential Swiss world premieres seen last year in Locarno, whether Best Animated Film for our Pardino d'Oro winner Voiceless (Sans Voix) by Samuel Patthey, Best Sound & Best Screenplay for The Sparrow in the Chimney (Der Spatz im Kamin) by Ramon and Silvan Zürcher, Best Cinematography for Electric Child by Simon Jaquemet, Best Documentary for We, the Inheritors (Wir Erben) by Simon Baumann, Best Graduation Film for Mom Dances (Maman danse) by Mégane Brügger, or Best Actress for the wonderful Laetitia Dosch for her performance in Dog on Trial (Le procès du chien), our unforgettable closing night film, which Dosch also directed.

We were also delighted to see the Ehrenpreis this year be bestowed on two extraordinary and beloved figures from Locarno's history: Bulle Ogier and Barbet Schroeder. The legendary filmmaker Schroeder was most recently in Locarno for Ricardo and Painting (Ricardo et la peinture), which he presented to great acclaim out of competition in 2023, while Ogier, one of the indisputable icons of French and Swiss cinema of the past six decades, was the recipient of our prestigious Pardo alla Carriera in 2015.

Congratulations to all the winners. It was truly a night to !

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Cover | Still © Alva Film, Inicia Films, Maretazo Cine

Send us your applications for the 2025 Locarno Critics Academy! ✍️ 4r5j1u

Locarno's workshop in film criticism gives emerging writers a crucial entry point into the world of festivals. Throughout the 78ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival (August 6 – 16, 2025), the selected participants will cover the Festival for a range of publications, including editorial partner MUBI Notebook, Variety, SWI Swissinfo, and the Festival's daily print publication Pardo, as well as engage in extensive dialogues and workshops with writers, critics, curators, festival directors, and filmmakers.

Starting for the first time this year, Critics Academy participants will also serve on an independent jury, awarding a film from the Concorso Cineasti del Presente with the MUBI Award (10,000 CHF cash prize).

From this year, Letterboxd can use their profiles as proof of a demonstrated interest in film criticism when making their application! 6y285b

→ Apply for the Critics Academy (by April 20, 2025)

→ Emerging filmmaker or industry professional? You can also apply to the Filmmakers or Industry Academy here

For our final episode for season two of Locarno Meets, we were delighted to be ed by actress Caroline Goodall, whose illustrious career has seen her turn in remarkable performances in now-classic films by many of the greatest names in contemporary cinema.

Goodall was in Locarno to promote her latest film, the Piazza Grande-playing Sew Torn, directed by the prodigious young director Freddy MacDonald. We spoke with the marvellous actress about working, in this case, with a gifted filmmaker in his early twenties, as well as reminiscing about some of her major films, like Schindler’s List, Hook, The Princess Diaries, and Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets is a Locarno Film Festival original podcast brought to you by UBS.

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After the end of the Second World War, the United Kingdom was forced to embark on a rocky road to national reconstruction and revival, with its people making sense of the social and political conditions of an era that included the collapse of its overseas empire and a battered domestic economy.

With Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema (1945-1960), the Locarno Film Festival dedicates its new Retrospective to celebrating a spectrum of British filmmaking of that period, showcasing the cultural response by the nation's varied directors, writers, producers, performers and studios.

Featuring everything from beloved classics by legendary filmmakers like David Lean, Basil Dearden and Powell & Pressburger to unheralded genre gems by lesser-known craftsmen like Seth Holt or Lance Comfort, the program celebrates British studio filmmakers from 1945 to 1960, when a new wave washed up on Britain's shores.

The program – done in partnership with the British Film Institute and the Cinémathèque suisse, and with the of StudioCanal – will bring together digital restorations and archival prints from, among other places, the collection of the BFI National Archive – which celebrates its 90ᵗʰ anniversary this year – helping to put British cinema produced between 1945 to 1960 back into conversation with the present. The Retrospective poster has been designed by Marcelo Granero.

→ Discover more: locarnofestival.ch/retrospettiva.html

An English-language book edited by Retrospective curator Ehsan Khoshbakht, featuring contributions by international writers and experts on British cinema, will be published by Les éditions de l'œil. Available for pre-order now on shop.locarnofestival.ch.

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Poster © Images courtesy of Group Film Productions Ltd, General Film Distributors Ltd, Park Circus ITV Studios, Michael Powell (Theatre) Ltd, STUDIOCANAL Films Ltd

Close your eyes for a moment and think of the sound a lightsaber makes. Think of the sound of Darth Vader breathing. Think of E.T. saying he wants to phone home. All those sound effects are the work of legendary sound designer Ben Burtt.

At the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, Burtt was in town to collect the Vision Award Ticinomoda, given to celebrate his exceptional career as a sound artist in Hollywood. From a childhood spent tape recording the sounds of movies from television to his pioneering effects work with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Ben Burtt has lived a life through sound.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets is a Locarno Film Festival original podcast brought to you by UBS.

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Producers don’t always get their day in the spotlight. At the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, the Raimondo Rezzonico Award was given to legendary indie producer Stacey Sher, who is responsible for a genuinely eye-popping line-up of iconic movies. Just to name a few: Pulp Fiction, Erin Brockovich, Reality Bites, Out of Sight, Mathilda, Mrs. America, Contagion, Man on the Moon, Gattaca, Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and recently the Hugh Grant-starring horror film Heretic.

Anybody with a career like that has plenty of stories to share, and when Sher ed us on Locarno Meets, she certainly didn’t disappoint.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets is a Locarno Film Festival original podcast brought to you by UBS.

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This week on Locarno Meets, we caught up with Italian star Luca Marinelli, best known to international audiences for his roles in M, The Eight Mountains, and Martin Eden. Marinelli was in Locarno to serve on the main jury at the 77ᵗʰ edition of the Festival alongside some of the leading lights of auteur cinema.

We took the opportunity to sit down with the charismatic and thoughtful actor to discuss his early influences – including watching De Sica and Fellini movies as a child –, his extraordinary performances done inside and outside of the Italian film industry, and his criteria for what makes a good movie.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets is a Locarno Film Festival original podcast brought to you by UBS.

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An exemplary character actor with a distinctive face: that’s how Tim Blake Nelson is perhaps most often described. Yet beyond memorable roles in films by Steven Spielberg, the Coen Brothers, and Terrence Malick, Nelson is also an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, responsible for a handful of impressive works in a variety of genres.

This week, Nelson s us on Locarno Meets while serving as a member of the jury at the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival and presenting the boxing drama Bang Bang out of competition at the Festival, following a successful debut at Tribeca. We took the chance to speak with the great actor about the appeal of genre, his boxing influences, and his ability to disappear into a role, whether through a physical transformation or by learning – as he is now doing – to convincingly play the mandolin at age 60.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets is a Locarno Film Festival original podcast, brought to you by UBS.

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Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner has one of the most immediately recognizable signatures as an auteur. Her films are known as much for their formal austerity as for their daring subject matter; they are films that – to use her phrase – “do not shout so loudly”.

Those are also the kinds of films that Hausner, as Jury President at the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, did not want to overlook in favor of louder, splashier titles. When she met her fellow jurors for the first time, Hausner stressed that it was important to consider films whose emotional power develops inside the viewer more slowly, accruing over time.

We sat down with Hausner for a conversation on Locarno Meets to delve into her process in making films, her taste in cinema, the more than 30 takes it often takes to get a scene right, and her philosophy as president of a festival jury.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets podcast is a Locarno Film Festival original production, brought to you by UBS.

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What are the ethics of AI art? Can it ever be a tool of artistic liberation or are AI systems inherently extractive? Should artists surrender knowledge of these tools or should they try to master them so they are put to better use?

These are some of the questions that came up in our conversation with filmmaker Paul Trillo, who has been experimenting with AI technologies for years. He was in Locarno as a guest at the ‘Future of Survival’ conference organized in parallel to the Festival itself, and we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to speak about this controversial and disruptive technology with a world-renowned artist for whom it is a signature tool of expression.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets podcast is a Locarno Film Festival original production, brought to you by UBS.

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In August 2017, we were fortunate enough to have David Lynch grace one of the Locarno Film Festival's big screens, as a character cameo in Lucky, the magnificent Ecumenical Prize-winning film of the 70th edition of our Festival. In the frame, Lynch takes his place next to Harry Dean Stanton, the movie's lead character – who ed away in September of that year – and among the dearest friends of the great Missoula-born filmmaker.

It is difficult to take proper of the void that David Lynch has left in contemporary cinema. It is also difficult merely to list everything that will never be the same after him. David Lynch was a visionary, essential, daring filmmaker. Able to challenge existing conventions and in doing so allowed us to cast a glance over the threshold, behind the door. His visions – sweet, disturbing, terrifying – were never without his affectionate Zen humor, the result of decades of meditation and detachment from the pressures and hurries of Hollywood cinema. David Lynch inhabited a world of his own, to which he offered us the keys. We could enter that world whenever we felt the need or desire. He had set no rules. He desired only that we look with our eyes open. That we would think with our whole being. After all, to pay homage to one of the most beautiful and free films of his impressive filmography, David Lynch’s was “a straight story”. A pedagogy of freedom that used the maieutic qualities of dreams to rewrite the possibilities of the world. The unconscious as the shaping force of our reality. And cinema as the conducting element verses magnificent and sweet states of hallucination. At the end of the day, and this is probably the most beautiful (non)lesson of his cinema: to find yourself, you must first get lost. Maybe in a David Lynch film. And in heaven everything is fine.

— Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno Film Festival's Artistic Director

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© Lucky (John Carroll Lynch, 2017)

The Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra is an experimental artist in the truest sense of the word. Time and again, Pêra has embraced still-nascent technologies without hesitation and with enormous playfulness, as with early digital video or 3D. Whatever the technology, he then tries to use them as a “toy of consciousness”, paraphrasing Aldous Huxley.

In this conversation on Locarno Meets, Pêra discusses his latest work, Telepathic Letters, an AI-generated feature film based around a fictional exchange of letters between Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and American fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft. This memorably gonzo experiment had its world premiere at the 77th Locarno Film Festival (August 2024) and was one of the most talked about works in the program.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets podcast is a Locarno Film Festival original production, brought to you by UBS.

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In 1994, a young Swiss-French rising star named Irène Jacob and a legendary Polish auteur, Krzysztof Kieślowski, travelled to Locarno to present Three Colors: Red on the Piazza Grande, in front of an audience of thousands of jubilant spectators. 30 years later, Jacob, now herself an established legend of international arthouse and commercial filmmaking, returned to Locarno to present the film while being honored with the Festival’s prestigious Leopard Club Award (2024).

We took the chance to sit down with Irène Jacob on Locarno Meets to reflect on the legacy of this monumental work and her remarkable and risk-taking career in the years since. In 2024 alone, Jacob has created indelible new films with Amos Gitai and Rithy Panh, each of which premiered to rave reviews at the Berlin and Venice film festivals. No matter the assignment, Irène Jacob continues to forge her own path – a deeply original one – within and through the landscape of international cinema.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets podcast is a Locarno Film Festival original production, brought to you by UBS.

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French-Algerian-Palestinian actress and filmmaker Lina Soualem has spent the past few artistically productive years co-writing a TV series (Oussekine, 2020) as well as directing the celebrated films Their Algeria (2020), about her French-Algerian grandparents and their fraught relationship with their homeland, and Bye Bye Tiberias (2023), about her mother, the celebrated Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, and the women of her family who stayed in their village in the Lower Galilee despite the effects of war, occupation, and erasure.

After premiering at the Venice Film Festival and having a successful distribution run arund the world, her film was nominated to represent Palestine at the Academy Awards in 2024. But Soualem was at the 77th Locarno Film Festival not primarily as a filmmaker but as a judge: she sat on the jury deciding the Swatch and MUBI First Feature Awards.

While she was in Locarno, we took the opportunity to sit down with Soualem on Locarno Meets to speak about how exactly she approached the work of navigating the complex relations of family, displacement, emigration, grief, and – yes – making films.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets podcast is a Locarno Film Festival original production, brought to you by UBS.

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Following a successful premiere at South by Southwest, 24-year-old Swiss-American filmmaker Freddy Macdonald, the youngest directing fellow ever accepted to the American Film Institute, brought his audacious debut feature Sew Torn to the Piazza Grande at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. 

We caught up with Freddy Macdonald on Locarno Meets during the Festival to discuss the unique genesis of the film, its many wild narrative twists and turns, as well as to unpack the influence of the Coen brothers on his work and talk about what it’s like to develop a film with one’s Dad.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets podcast is a Locarno Film Festival original production, brought to you by UBS.

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As the writer, director and star of Timestalker, it’s safe to say that the British multi-hyphenate Alice Lowe is bringing her ion project to Locarno’s Piazza Grande. Her sophomore feature – which follows zany serial killer flick Prevenge (2016), her directorial debut, and a robust acting career as a staple of British comedy, including shows such as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) – is a cosmic romantic comedy, in which a woman (Lowe) keeps reincarnating, only to fall for the same Mr. Wrong in every new timeline. Timestalker is a hopelessly romantic journey through space and time, exuding Lowe’s genuine and infectious love of fun, spontaneous cinema.

Article/interview by Hugo Emmerzael.

You can also watch our interview with Alice Lowe on Locarno Meets, available on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Locarno Meets: our video podcast presented by UBS.

Hugo Emmerzael: You played a serial killer in your debut feature Prevenge, so it’s quite ironic that in this film you’re the one constantly being killed. Was that a conscious decision?

Alice Lowe: I definitely wanted to play with that. I always only realize after the fact that my films are a bit of a reflection of my mental state at that time. In that sense, Prevenge is a much more nihilistic and darker film [than this one], in which I do indeed kill a lot of people. So, this time around, I felt that it would be better, as a writer and for my ego, to keep killing myself, almost as if I deserved it. I guess, on some karmic scale, it was just my turn. Meanwhile, my films are always working on a metaphorical level – and with the hardships that the creative industries have struggled with as of late, especially through COVID, I conceived of this film as a metaphor for keeping this dream of filmmaking and creativity alive. We all know many projects die a certain death at some point, and I think the only thing that keeps you going is this sort of romantic dream. So, the film is very much about that – about keeping going even when it's not a good idea and it turns out to be self-destructive.

HE: It feels like Timestalker embodies that creative death drive very strongly. The film has such a huge scope and this incredibly kaleidoscopic, time-bending plot. Did you feel like you had to go all the way with this one?

AL: Absolutely! I simply love making films – I love being on set, love acting and love directing. It’s such a privilege for me to do all that. I was also conscious that I may never get to do all of it again, especially after I had my second baby and the COVID lockdown happened. Obviously, I want to make lots more films, but you never really know, do you? So, this sense of mortality crept in. I'm glad that you mention the scope, as I wanted to be really ambitious and simply put everything in. Like, all the things that excite me about filmmaking are in Timestalker. Not a lot of British films seem to be about fantasy or surrealism anymore, which is a shame, because directors like Powell and Pressburger have a huge influence on me. Their films are so timeless in the way they play with the imagination and reflect on mortality and the human condition. Compared to Prevenge, I also wanted this film to have a more hopeful tone, to have something a bit more redemptive about it. All the characters are obviously flawed and screwed up, but you grow to like them in the end. You have a hope for them that they're going to have a better time in the next life.

HE: By showing all these reincarnated versions of your own character, Timestalker explores how the position of women in society has shifted throughout history, mostly for the better. And yet, even after all these centuries, you also emphasize that women still aren’t completely liberated and emancipated. How do you see that relationship between progress and also being somewhat stuck in time?

AL: I think there’s always a double bind as a female writer: you want your female characters to escape the constraints of society and also to escape the constraints of narrative. Especially with a romantic comedy, you’re like, how the hell do you do this without succumbing to the same story over and over again? In your fantasies, you want your characters to escape, but the reality is that often the characters aren’t able to do so. Quite often when I’m writing, I’m thinking, “Ah, but this isn't truthful to women's experiences.” More often than not, they feel like they can’t escape, or like they haven’t won. So, without getting to spoiler-y, I’d say the film has a kind of double ending, in which it’s almost like you can choose whether you're a fantasist or a realist. Does she actually escape this time loop and become happy, or does she not?

HE: These fantastical elements are amplified by the colorful esthetic of the film, which are just so delightfully vibrant and out there. I imagine that the budget was tight, making the visuals even more impressive. How did you pull that off?

AL: When I’m trying to sell a concept, I’m usually across all of it. I’m writing, directing, and starring in the film, so I’m physically there at all times. This means that if we find a location that doesn’t quite conform to the script, I can change the script. And I can even do that on the spot when we’re filming. It makes the film feel intentional at all times, even when we have to compromise or adapt. Something that became a kind of thematic philosophy for us was, “Reincarnation is just the recycling of souls”. We took that to heart. Also, when we were talking with a funding partner like BFI, we pitched that we would reuse everything: locations, actors, extras, costumes. Really, it’s a decision that normally would be a mistake, but because it’s built into the concept of the film, you can get away with it. For me, that’s what I love about filmmaking, this kind of lateral thinking.

HE: Even your breakthrough role in the cult comedy series Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) suggests a kind of laissez-faire, everything-is-possible philosophy. So, has this free-spirited form of filmmaking been influenced by your varied acting career?

AL: We used to have such a strong comedy network in the UK, building on that Monty Python tradition. It means that a lot of the creativity that was coming out in the past decades, weirdly enough, came through comedy. It's actually quite interesting that a lot of the peers I worked with in that time have gone into film, because, nowadays, independent film is one of the last few truly creative mediums. I definitely saw that every time I worked as an actor, I would learn something from the director that informed me about how I like to work [as a director?]. For me, it’s mostly about that controlled spontaneity.

HE: Your first short film as a director was Solitudo in 2014. How long before that had you already aspired to direct?

AL: It was a long-gestating thing. I actually started out in theater. Back then I already loved having that sense of complete creative control. I always thought that that was what I wanted to do, and then I accidentally got into comedy, which obviously was much more commercially viable. Television, however, was never really the right fit for me. Then it took me a long time to call myself a writer, even when I was in comedy. It took me even longer to voice the desire of wanting to become a director. I was afraid that I would come across as arrogant when I would say that I wanted to be in control. Especially for a woman in that era, it felt sort of frowned upon. But at some point, I got asked by Jamie Adams to work on this feature film called Black Mountain Poets (2015) which was conceived as an improvisational film and basically made in three days. In a way it was a process that really annoyed me, but it did make me realize I’m quite good at this film thing – that, in fact, I could do this. I also found out that I really loved it! Now people often ask me, “How do you direct and act at the same time? Isn’t that really difficult?” And I'm like, “No! I love it!” I'm finally creating a lovely environment for the actors where they feel free and happy as well, which is still rare.

HE: You really sense that spontaneity in the film. As the director and star, how do you work with your other actors on set?

AL: It's all just a very human process, I suppose, about finding the emotional truth of everything. If an actor comes on set and they're nervous, I always say, “Well, use those nerves. Just show the reality, do not try to hide it.” I think if you get that emotional sincerity right, you can do whatever you want with your films. It can be about goblins, it can be completely surreal, but as long as people have that human connection to latch onto, they'll forgive you for anything.

HE: A big part of what makes this film sing is the expressive score, which really enhances the kaleidoscopic visuals. What were you looking for in the interplay between music and imagery? 

AL: The composers, Toydrum, also did Prevenge and Solitudo, so I've got a long working relationship with them. We developed this film for years, so it was very joyous to be able to have a conversation over a long period of time about what the music should be. I knew that the music would be a character in its own right. It’s part of the narrative and has a personality of its own. It's also not conforming to any genre; it's telling a separate story. We got really excited about the idea of having a motif in the score, which is frankly not very fashionable anymore – but we wanted an actual tune that's recognizable, that reoccurs throughout the whole film, and that reminds you that you're watching the same story and that you're having the same emotions, even though you're constantly in a different world. In that way it tied everything together, and that was really one of the most challenging aspects of the film. The film is about reincarnation, so we tried to capture that uncanny feeling of constantly going, “Oh, I feel like I know this song.”

HE: It feels like you’re trying to keep some sort of magic alive in your film.

AL: I hope so! I just want to make films that feel like a treat – that, when you see the trailer of Timestalker, it feels like eating sweets or something. I feel like not enough independent films have that ambition. Sometimes there’s the idea that you’re maybe not supposed to enjoy all of this film stuff. Timestalker is a clever film, and it wants to be artistic and challenging with its themes, but you’re also allowed to just enjoy it. That’s what I got out of a lot of films that I used to watch when I was younger. I’d be so excited to see a Hammer horror film on the television after 11 p.m. and just knowing that it was going to be fun. With Timestalker, I really had to ask myself, “Am I allowed to do this?” – because in the UK, certainly with female filmmakers, I feel like there are many constraints that we’re not allowed to go outside of – almost like you're not allowed to be more commercial, in a way.

HE: So, you feel the danger of being typecast as a female director?

AL: Yes, exactly. It’s almost as if people tell you, “Why don’t you make another really serious film?” But the thing is, what if I don’t want to do that? What if I want to be Steven Spielberg and make the next E.T.? The question that lies underneath it is actually: are we allowed to have fun? That’s a bigger question with art in general, as we’re in this new era where so many factors are endangering independent art and creativity. Are we still allowed to enjoy our jobs? Or are we supposed to hate them? I, however, intend to have fun doing this, and I want to enjoy it for as long as I can.

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Cover
© Timestalker Limited, photograph by Ludovic Robert

“I think a lot of my work is about aspiring to something lofty. And then failing at it. Which I find funny”, says Alice Lowe, director and star of Timestalker, showed on the Piazza Grande at the 77th Locarno Film Festival.

In a free-flowing conversation on her influences and artistic aspirations, Lowe – a major star of UK sketch comedy of the 2000s, director of Prevenge and co-writer of Sightseers – sat down on Locarno Meets to talk through the sheer Britishness of her latest time travel comedy extravaganza, influenced by everything from Sally Potter to Powell & Pressburger to Doctor Zhivago, and getting her start at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival walking through a giant tambourine.

Welcome to Locarno Meets, where established legends of cinema and exciting new talents chat about art, life, movies and everything in between. Locarno Meets podcast is a Locarno Film Festival original production, brought to you by UBS.

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In 1950 prominent Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti (1897 – 1982) returned to his native country, after living and working regularly in Europe. It supposed to be a great hero’s return. In the end, regrettably, it was a personal failure for the great director.

In those years, nevertheless, Cavalcanti succeeded in making three significant feature films, including Mulher de Verdade (1954). 70 years after its release, this lost gem of Brazilian cinema has been beautifully restored in 4K and is now available to stream for free on our website until January 10, 2025.

→ Watch the film

Conserved by Cinemateca Brasileira, the film is the winner of the 2023 ‘Heritage restoration contest’ of Locarno Heritage: Locarno Pro's project devoted to the classic film industry. Film restoration: Cinegrell.

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© Cinemateca Brasileira Collection. Special thanks to Cinematográfica Maristela and Marco Audrá