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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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)!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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?

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.

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 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).

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.

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. 

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…

“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 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 1924, a pugnacious businessman who grew up impoverished in a New York tenement co-founded a movie studio. That studio came to be Columbia Pictures, and that man its long-reigning mogul Harry Cohn. With humble beginnings and an economical eye for budget, Columbia had a knack for turning out ingenious motion pictures with talent on loan from other studios, from Cary Grant to Carol Lombard. Those films would become stone-cold exemplars of their genre – The Awful Truth (1937), for instance, or Twentieth…