Asked in an interview ahead of the 79th Locarno Film Festival how it is that the runner-up to the big five among the A-list festivals is so much more open, progressive, accessible, and diverse, Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro said, "We don’t choose films to be particularly progressive, but for their artistic merit." It’s the perfect counter-argument to the likes of Cannes, Venice, and Karlovy Vary, where quality and diversity are treated as mutually exclusive opposites, suggesting that prioritising one would inevitably mean compromising the other. At Locarno, a rich selection of different voices and a programme committed to expanding beyond the US and Eurocentric circle and a few eclectic names from Asia are valued as prerequisites of cinematic grandeur.
The 79th edition, held from 5 to 15 August, had loads of it, without harsh glitches like last year’s podium for Abdellatif Kechiche’s Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due. Formal innovation and political engagement proved the defining qualities of the competition’s 17 titles and the 15 films running in the most important side section, Concorso Cineasti del Presente. With the 233 films screened across 11 sections, contemporary cinema really felt contemporary: stylistically uncategorised and intellectually unruly in its confrontation of a present maimed by war and geopolitical terror, ecological and humanitarian disasters, social fissures, angst and apathy. Erin Vassilopoulos's skater self-discovery story Destroy All Girls, the queer thriller The Riverbank by Matheus Farias and Enock Carvalho, and Beatrice Gibson‘s gorgeous nocturne At Night all embodied these shifts.
The jury led by Fabrice Du Welz ultimately rewarded Florin Şerban's socially critical father-son drama You Don’t Belong Here with the Pardo d’Oro. The Riverbank received the Special Jury Prize, while Hong Sang-soo’s return to old form Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, won double, taking the prize for Best Director and Best Acting for Kim Min-hee. That the Korean actress had to share the recognition with Monica Bellucci was one of the few missteps of the awards ceremony, which sets a positive example in terms of style and accessibility: no tickets, no dress code, just cinephilia. The leopard trophy for Best Emerging Director at Concorso Cineasti del Presente went to Beatrice Gibson, whereas Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die received the Special Jury Prize.
Performance awards went to Idrissu Tontie Jr. for the Ghanaian coming-of-age tale Ego Reach We All and Manal Issa for Summer Meadow, about the long journey to overcome trauma. Cinema icons and behind-the-scenes innovators brought the obligatory star appeal. Legendary make-up and special-effects artist Rick Baker received the Vision Award and discussed a career that transformed physical effects into an expressive cinematic language. Darren Aronofsky, honoured with the Pardo d’Onore, Isabella Rossellini, James Gray, Asia Argento and Zoë Saldaña all joined the public talks and gave the festival its necessary glamour. Though the main competition boasted more prestigious names, the place for discoveries is always the Concorso Cineasti del Presente, witnessing the formation of future auteurs and filmic language in formation.
In an era of constant outer pressure, the narrative motifs of transformations, hybrid stages, and mutilations reflect that alarmingly increasing normative force. Persistent themes of fractured memory, trauma, nostalgia, and rewritten histories show how the past comes to life in the present, stylistically, psychologically, and politically. This was eerily apparent in the timely retrospective about the blacklisting of Hollywood's Left, tracing how McCarthyism reshaped US cinema. Locarno’s topicality and artistic ambition also highlight the imminent endangerment of open spaces. As attendance becomes insanely expensive, ticket prices soar, AI replaces art, and ChatGPT supplants film journalism, Locarno’s upcoming big anniversary feels all the more like a turning point. The defining feature of film festivals becomes uniformity; exceptions have to fight for their existence.