The Feast of the Leopard: Locarno Celebrates 70th Anniversary

The Locarno Film Festival, the outpost of new, progressive and daring cinema, will open its gates soon and the festival will open them to its new house, Palazzo del Cinema and GranRex Locarno. The refurbishing of Palazzo del Cinema was finished just in time to celebrate the festival's 70th anniversary.

The lineup of the upcoming edition is brimming with world premieres, starting with Romanian black comedy Charleston, a first fiction feature outing by Andrei Cretulescu, in a story where a recent grieving widower is asked for help overcoming the sorrow by his wife's lover .

The international competition will also further introduce a noir thriller by F.J. Ossang, 9 Doigts; a Brazilian effort, As Boas Maneiras (Good Manners), co-directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, described as a light genre effort featuring an unborn child ripping out of its mother's womb to be raised by a hired nanny; and Jan Speckenbach's drama Freedom, following a couple splitting up as the wife pursues freedom.

The competiion includes Swiss debuting director Dominik Locher's Goliath, a story about a young couple in which a man starts using steroids and then attacks his pregnant girlfriend; Isabelle Huppert and Romain Duris-led newest, loose, female-centred adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Serge Bozon, Madame Hyde; and one cinephile gem, finished after almost 30 years and after the original director's death, in which a group of Chilean filmmakers reconstructed La Telenovela Errant by the great Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz.

The "Filmmakers of the Present" competition will welcome Eliza Hittman's sophomore feature Beach Rats; Andrea Magnani's black comedy Easy, the nickname of the protagonist for whom nothing is easy even when he is supposed to transport a coffin with body from Italy to Ukraine; Shevaun Mizrahi´s “existential exploration of the cyclical nature of time and humanity´s search for meaning both in struggles of youth and in the recollections of old age,” titled Distant Constellation; and Ana Urushadze´s feature debut Scary Mother, following a middle-aged housewife who finally achieved her dream of publishing a book and realizes her fears of negative reception were not that ungrounded.

Naturally, there are many more cinephilic treats in store. Radu Jude will return to the Swiss gathering, bringing his latest project after the spectacular Scarred Hearts, The Dead Nation, a docu-essay on the rise of anti-Semitism and a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust,; Dane Komljen, the co-director of mesmerizing docufiction All the Cities of the North, will introduce “a film in two movements linked together by a story about men being turned into foxes,” titled Fantasy Sentences; and venerable European auteur Jean-Marie Straub will be feted with Leopard of Honor in a special ceremony accompanied by screenings of his works.

The Locarno Film Festival will run from August 2-12

International competition

9 Doigts By F.J. Ossang

As Boas Maneiras By Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra

Charleston By Andreï Cretulescu

Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? By Travis Wilkerson

En El Séptimo Día by Jim Mackay

Freiheit By Jan Speckenbach

Gemini By Aaron Katz

Gli Asteroidi By Germano Maccioni

Goliath By Dominik Locher

Good Luck By Ben Russell

La Telenovela Errante By Raúl Ruiz, Valéria Sarmiento

Lucky By John Carroll Lynch

Madame Hyde By Serge Bozon

Mrs. Fang By Wang Bing

Qing Ting Zhi Yan (Dragonfly Eyes) By Xu Bing

Ta Peau Si Lisse By Denis Côté

Vinterbrødre (Winter Brothers) By Hlynur Pálmason

Wajib (Duty) By Annemarie Jacir

Filmmakers of the Present Competition

3/4 By Ilian Metev Abschied

Von Den Eltern By Astrid Johanna Ofner

Beach Rats By Eliza Hittman

Cho-Haeng (The First Lap) By Kim Dae-Hwan

Dene Wos Guet Geit By Cyril Schäublin

Distant Constellation By Shevaun Mizrahi

Easy By Andrea Magnani

Edaha No Koto (Sweating The Small Stuff) By Ninomiya Ryutaro

Il Monte Delle Formiche By Riccardo Palladino

Le Fort Des Fous By Narimane Mari

Meteorlar By Gürcan Keltek

Milla By Valerie Massadian

Person To Person By Dustin Guy Defa

Sashishi Ded (Scary Mother) By Ana Urushadze

Severina By Felipe Hirsch

Verão Danado By Pedro Cabeleira

Piazza Grande

Amori Che Non Sanno Stare Al Mondo by Francesca Comencini

Atomic Blonde by David Leitch

Chien by Samuel Benchetrit

Demain Et Tous Les Autres Jours by Noémie Lvovsky

Drei Zinnen By Jan Zabeil

Good Time By Ben Safdie, Joshua Safdie

Gotthard - One Life, One Soul By Kevin Merz

I Walked With A Zombie By Jacques Tourneur

Iceman By Felix Randau

Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres By Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani

Lola Pater By Nadir Moknèche

Sicilia! By Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet

Sparring By Samuel Jouy

The Big Sick By Michael Showalter

The Song Of Scorpions By Anup Singh

What Happened To Monday? By Tommy Wirkola

Fuori concorso

Acta Non Verba by Yvann Yagchi

Anatomia del Miracolo by Alessandra Celesia

Azmaish by Sabiha Sumar

Choisir a vingt hans by Villi Hermann

Contes de juillet by Guillaume Brac

Grandeur et decadence d´un petit commerce de cinema by Jean-Luc Godard

Ibi by Andrea Segre

Le Venerable W. by Barbet Schroeder

Nazidanie by Boris Yukhananov and Aleksandr Shein

Nothingwood by Sonia Kronlund

Nous sommes jeunes et nous jours sont longs by Léa Forest and Cosme Castro

Piazza Grande by Misha Gyorik and Michael Beltrami

Pietra tenera by Aurélie Mertenat

Prototype by Blake Williams

Sand und Blut by Matthias Krepp and Angelika Spangel

The Reagan Show by Pacho Velez and Sierra Pettengill

Willkommen in der Schweiz by Sabine Gisiger

Semaine de la critique

Blood Amber by Yong Chao Lee

Das Kongo Tribunal by Milo Rau

Družina by Rok Biček

Favela Olímpica by Samuel Chalard

Las cinéphilas by María Álvarez

Senorita Maria, la falda de la Montana by Rubén Mendoza

The Poetess by Stefanie Brockhaus and Andreas Wolff