Locarno isn’t a film festival. It’s a pilgrimage. My journey to the legendary festival, which celebrated its 77th edition this year, involved planes, trains, and automobiles to land in Milan, Italy before crossing the border into Locarno. The odyssey felt well worth it when I caught sight of the narrow stone pebble streets, the gelato-colored swirl of townhouses, cozy antique shops and Italian-language bookstores. Above the streets hung clothes lines of black and yellow undergarments and leopard print banners that all seemed to wind to one spot: the Piazza Grande—where sits an open-air sea of chairs facing one of the biggest screens in Europe.
Located in Ticino, Switzerland’s southernmost canton, Locarno is usually a leisurely beachfront town surrounded by soothing mountain peaks. However, the unhurried pace is broken whenever the town is overrun by thousands of cinephiles during the ten-day festival. This year, it took place during a sweltering hot week that hosted major guests like Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón, Hong Sang-soo, Ben Burtt, Jessica Hausner, Luca Marinelli, Stacey Sher, Irene Jacobs, Shah Rukh Khan, and more.
Locarno is quite different from its European counterparts like Cannes, Berlin, and Karlovy Vary. Here, the buzz isn’t generated by trying to catch the fast-rising awards contender. Rather, it’s propelled by a genuine desire by cinephiles to search for the rare discovery and the unlikely new voice, giving life to the pre-screening of a leopard’s roar followed by a card defiantly reading “Cinema Forever.”
There were plenty of pleasures to be had this year, from the rare films to the massive crowds and the day-to-day happenings of the festival, that I have continued to turn over in my mind.
The competition, for instance, featured elusive, complex films such as Hong Sang-soo’s “By the Stream” (whose actress Kim Min-hee won the festival’s top acting prize), Kurdwin Ayub’s Special Jury Prize winning picture “Moon,” Pia Marais’ deconstructive work “Transamazonia,” Wang Bing’s “Youth (Hard Times),” Ala Eddine Sim’s political ghost story “Agora,” along with two vastly different Lithuanian films like Laurynas Bareiša’ “Drowning Dry” and Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Golden Leopard winner “Toxic.”
Following his Golden Leopard win 2023 for “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” Romanian director Radu Jude returned out of competition with two new works: a supercut compendium of Romanian television commercials called “Eight Postcards from the Utopia” and his Andy Warhol tribute “Sleep #2.” I also found Serbian filmmaker Iva Radivojević’s “When the Phone Rang,” a coming-of-age story about the Yugoslav Wars, which screened in Concorso Cineasti del Presente, to be another significant highlight.
To me, however, the big draw of the festival was the Columbia Pictures 100 Retrospective: The Lady With The Torch (1929-1959). During Locarno, 44 classics and rarities screened to tell the story of the studio that rose from Poverty Row to becoming a juggernaut. I was lucky enough to screen 13 of the selections and wrote about them for the site (my favorite was the Henry Fonda led ‘wrong man’ picture “Let Us Live”).
While attending my fourth European festival of the year, however, I was struck by the abundance of titles that I didn’t catch that may never leave the festival. That anxiety isn’t particular to Locarno. Every festival from Cannes to Sundance has a chunk of the lineup that’ll only play in a theater for a few brief times before it fades into general obscurity. I think it’s why I push myself to cover as much as I possibly can, so that others can know these films did exist. That desire does fly in the face of the conventional chicken versus the egg argument: How can we commit the budget to writing about movies that may never make it to the states? The usual retort to that question is, of course: “How can they make it to the states if we don’t cover them?”
It’s no secret to anyone who has spent a modicum of time covering film that the distribution, exhibition, and critical space is broken. The ways to get new, challenging movies from around the globe in front of the eyes of fervent film fans is diminishing. Letterboxd has certainly helped. Through its reliance on lists and other strategies that speak to completists, helping to expand the kind of films people are seeking (there’s a reason many theaters and festivals have taken to the platform), it has encouraged many to seek out works outside of their wheelhouse. That’s why it was heartening to see them at Locarno with a jury consisting of Ella Kemp, Ena Alvarado, Amarsanaa Battulga, Tereza Dodoková, Emerson Goo, Esmé Holden, and Öykü Sofuoğlu. Together, they presented the Letterboxd Piazza Grande Award to “Gaucho, Gaucho,” a gorgeously shot rodeo documentary from the filmmakers behind “Truffle Hunters” that felt slightly overshadowed by its competition when it premiered at Sundance.
But apart from social media, broadening the tent of cinephiles remains difficult. I wish I could bottle the feeling of a film festival, the way a place like Locarno distributes a daily paper called the Pardo, the deep discussions about film, politics, and culture that can occur in line between screenings, and the awareness of the future of this medium. And, in the critical space, how can we continue to decry the slow downturn of the pipeline that brings these films to audiences, when very little risk is taken to write about films that play outside of the mainstream or even the prestige?
During the festival’s closing night, those questions remained. And as I walked back to my hotel from a courtyard party—where the dancefloor was packed with jubilant festival goers rocking to the sweaty tones of a shredding saxophone player—down the stone-pebbled streets toward a quiet and dark Piazza Grande, I felt somewhat hopeful, as I do at the end of every festival, that this might possibly be the next building block to retooling this space. For a brief moment, in fact, my mind even calmed as I came across a celebratory crowd dancing, swaying, and jumping to a group of buskers. Each seemingly possessed person took turns spinning and gyrating to their own rhythm and to their own soul, each distinct from one another. The leopard may have then been sleeping. But its roar could still be heard.