Founded in 1946, Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival is one of the world’s longest-running film festivals, known for its adventurous programming, exciting retrospectives, and nightly open-air screenings in the Piazza Grande, capable of seating 8,000 spectators. The latter is by no means the only screening spot (the GranRex, where most retrospective screenings take place, is a wonderful cinema), but it’s the location most associated with the festival.
Hosting world premieres and special screenings of highlights from Cannes, SXSW, and other early-year festivals, this year’s Piazza Grande selection includes the launch of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette portrait “The Flood,” starring Guillaume Canet and Mélanie Laurent; Bérénice Béjo-led thriller “Mexico 86”; Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes prizewinner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”; actor Paz Vega’s directorial debut “Rita”; and the world premiere of Tarsem Singh’s restored recut of “The Fall.”
The Piazza Grande often showcases more mainstream fare (“Bullet Train,” “Where the Crawdads Sing,” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” played outdoors in recent years), but Locarno has always prided itself on providing a less hostile platform for emerging filmmakers and established auteurs whose work may not conform to the commercial demands or awards season hoopla of the international marketplace, as found more prominently at the looming Venice, Toronto, and New York festivals. Recent winners of Locarno’s prestigious Golden Leopard award include Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” Hong Sang-soo (who returns this year with “By the Stream”), Pedro Costa’s “Vitalina Varela,” and the great Chinese documentarian Wang Bing (back in competition with “Youth (Hard Times)”).
On the retrospective front, Locarno will be celebrating the centenary of Columbia Pictures, with a focus on the studio’s output up until the death of co-founder, president and production head Harry Cohn in the late ’50s. The multi-faceted strand, curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, features screwball comedies, musicals, noir, westerns, war movies and more, many of which are screening from 35mm prints, with some of the more famous titles (“The Lady from Shanghai,” “Twentieth Century,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”) playing from 4K restorations.
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