Locarno Film Festival
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“Cinema Forever” (?): Locarno Film Festival 2024
The biggest headline of the 77th Locarno Film Festival wasn’t a movie but a man: Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan, who attended to receive a career achievement award as a reminder (none is needed) of the role red carpet celebrity plays in drawing money and attention to festivals which can then, aspirationally, redirect both towards smaller title. But even as the whole idea of “cinema” requires increasingly vigilant caretaking, those festivals themselves are nearly all in financial trouble. When I got this job at Filmmaker a decade ago, companies who’d invested a lot of time and money in VR were […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 19, 2024 -
Locarno 2023: Circles of Reference
Festivals have a baked-in tension between the works they’re meant to showcase—marginal relative to the marketplace, hence the (sometimes pejorative) descriptor “festival film”—and the sponsorships necessary for them to operate, the larger and more corporate the better. Cracks will inevitably emerge; thus, attending Locarno with his latest, The Old Oak, socialist Ken Loach spent part of his press conference dutifully denouncing sponsors UBS Bank, prompting two Swiss journalists sitting next to an attending friend to draw their breath sharply in protest: “UBS is an ethical bank.” Another tension is between the ideal of a “festival film”—work at the boundaries of what’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 23, 2023 -
The 2023 Locarno Film Festival Lineup Features Lav Diaz, Radu Jude, Quentin Dupieux and More
The full lineup has been unveiled for the 76th Locarno International Film Festival, which will take place in the Swiss town from August 2-12. At a glance, highlights include new films from Filipino slow cinema auteur Lav Diaz, Romanian social satirist Radu Jude, zany French funnyman Quentin Dupieux and Argentine director Eduardo Williams (who actually needs three films in a trilogy, anyway?). Also featured in this year’s lineup is Family Portrait, the feature debut from Lucy Kerr, who we included on our annual 25 New Faces of Film list last year. Check out the full lineup below, and visit Locarno’s official […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jul 5, 2023 -
“Without the Consent of our Child Protagonists We Would Not Have Made the Film”: Lidia Duda on her Locarno-Premiering Doc Fledglings
Premiering at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Lidia Duda’s Fledglings is an entrancing look at a trio of seven year olds who bravely travel far from home to board at a school for the visually impaired. Forced to rely only on themselves, their teachers — and most importantly one another — Zosia, Oskar and Kinga spend their days mastering everything from handrails to utensils, to spelling words and playing the piano. Not to mention navigating often overwhelming emotions. (At least for the creative Zosia and sensitive Oskar, whose developmental disabilities can sometimes stress the besties out. Kinga, on the other […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 12, 2022 -
Cinema is Back (?): Locarno Film Festival 2021
In light of the ongoing pandemic and, more pertinently, its repercussions on the public screening of films, weighing in on a festival in any peremptory way might be trickier than ever. This year’s Locarno Film Festival, which returned to its physical form after last year’s hiatus, is a case in point. If the mere fact of being once again able to enjoy a film in the safely distanced and masked company of dispassionate strangers is cause for celebration, the work can still be indigestibly lousy even under these jubilant circumstances. The relative joy and definite privilege of being able to […]
by Celluloid Liberation Front on Aug 25, 2021 -
Alice T., Too Late to Die Young and Four More From Locarno 2018
There was a bittersweet, valedictory quality to the 71st edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Over the past decade or so, Locarno has carved out a place for itself as a space for arthouse true believers, handing out top prizes to the likes of Lav Diaz and Wang Bing and seeing premieres of key films by Pedro Costa and Chantal Akerman, in the process becoming a byword for a certain kind of distinctly 21st-century, boundary blurring art cinema—to tweak the title of one of the festival’s main programs, filmmaking “of the present.” Recently, in both a validation of everything the […]
by Daniel Witkin on Aug 15, 2018 -
Locarno Critic’s Notebook #2: The Dreamed Path, The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me and The Human Surge
Angela Schanelec’s continued lack of recognition, at least outside of Germany, is genuinely baffling. Judging from the dismissive-to-hostile reactions that followed the premiere of her eighth feature at the Locarno Film Festival, this regrettable state of affairs is unlikely to change. And yet, out of the competition entries I managed to see, The Dreamed Path is the only one I feel deserves to be called a masterpiece. The Dreamed Path is a demanding film, even more so than Schanelec’s previous work, but the challenge is legitimated by being commensurate with her thematic ambition: to dissect the torturous dialectic between the universal […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Aug 12, 2016 -
Locarno Critic’s Notebook #1: The Ornithologist, Mister Universo, The Hedonists, All Clues Lead to Berlin
In the last two years, the main slate of the Locarno Film Festival had been nigh miraculously star-studded (in strictly arthouse terms), boasting premieres by the likes of Chantal Akerman, Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz and Andrzej Żuławski, to name but four of the most prominent. Perhaps inevitably, normality had to be reinstated eventually and this year presented less immediately mouth-watering offerings. Indeed, the best films in this first half of the festival were to be found outside of the international competition. Thus far, the most anticipated title has also been the most disappointing: Portuguese auteur João Pedro Rodrigues’ The Ornithologist, […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Aug 8, 2016 -
Women Directors in Locarno: Anne Émond, Athena Rachel Tsangari, Petra Costa and Lea Glob
Chevalier is a film about six men vacationing on a yacht in the middle of the Aegean Sea. After the world premiere in the main international competition at the Locarno International Film Festival, I climbed an arduous, though relatively small Swiss mountain to sit down with director Athina Rachel Tsangari during her final hours in Locarno. My own last hours in Switzerland were spent with Anne Émond, whose film Our Loved Ones also celebrated its world premiere in Locarno. Our Loved Ones is about how a suicide affects a family living in a small town outside Quebec. Both Our Loved […]
by Taylor Hess on Aug 31, 2015 -
Right Then, Right Now: The Locarno Film Festival 2015
Considering last year’s Locarno Film Festival presented what turned out to be some of the best films of 2014 – Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before, Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, Martín Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired and Matías Piñeiro’s The Princess of France – artistic director Carlo Chatrian had a lot to live up to in his third year of tenure. Unbelievably, when the program of the festival’s 68th edition was announced, the main competition featured an even more impressive selection of auteurs. Though the extremely high expectations weren’t quite met, it was nevertheless an excellent year, and for every disappointment […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Aug 19, 2015
