Locarno Pro closed its largest edition to date, passing 2,000 accreditations for the first time and reinforcing its position as an increasingly consequential meeting point for independent cinema.
The 2026 edition registered 2,140 industry delegates, up 10% from 1,940 in 2025, including 1,949 professionals on site and 191 participating online. Nearly 100 countries were represented, while Match Me!, Alliance 4 Development and Open Doors generated 1,463 pre-scheduled meetings.
Across Industry Screenings, First Look, the SWISS FILMS and Spanish previews and Heritage Monday, 78 titles were presented.
The more revealing story, however, was what delegates were discussing inside the rooms, such as consolidation, shrinking sources of traditional support, new investment rules, the limits of predictive data and the need to connect development much earlier with audiences. Across the programme, Locarno Pro portrayed an independent sector searching for a more flexible combination of public funding, private capital, international co-production and community-based distribution.
“The numbers show Pro is cementing its place as an essential industry platform, but what matters more to me is what happens inside those numbers,” Locarno Pro director Markus Duffner said in his closing assessment. That distinction proved apt.
The edition’s strongest sessions repeatedly returned to the same tension: The industry wants greater certainty, yet the work most likely to cut through remains difficult to model, finance and categorize.
StepIn questions the business of certainty
Locarno Pro’s StepIn think tank opened with a deliberately unsettling proposition. The film business has never possessed more data, but it remains remarkably poor at predicting what audiences will embrace.
In his talk "Fear, Lies, and the Illusion of Control," analyst Stephen Follows examined a century of purported “de-risking” devices, from stars and test screenings to tracking, franchises, comparables and algorithms. His argument was not that research has no value, but that many industry tools function less as reliable forecasting mechanisms. They can move risk at the margins while giving decision-makers the emotional comfort of believing that an intrinsically volatile business has been brought under control.
Follows estimated that only 3.4% of independent films in his dataset generated a profit. Box-office revenue, he noted, follows an extreme power law in which a small number of largely unpredictable outliers capture a disproportionate share of returns.
As a cautionary case, he cited Relativity Media, whose heavily promoted data-led model backed 44 films before the company went bankrupt, later re-emerged and went bankrupt again. Yet Follows rejected the fatalism often attached to William Goldman’s maxim that “nobody knows anything.”
The more useful reading, he suggested, is that every greenlight remains a guess, albeit one that can be better informed. The practical challenge is therefore to distinguish evidence that improves a decision from services that merely sell the feeling of safety.
That question was carried into a panel with Lucky Red founder Andrea Occhipinti, mk2 production chief Yasmine Talli and University of Glasgow cultural-economy scholar Doris Ruth Eikhof. Occhipinti said Lucky Red does not use algorithms to choose films, citing acquisitions including Ida, Moonlight and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return as examples in which emotion, political urgency and accumulated taste outweighed discouraging market signals.
Talli described a more blended approach, mk2 begins with human response but considers festival history, producers, cast and comparable titles when reducing more than 400 annual submissions to approximately 15–20 projects. Even then, she said, the decisive factor is a spark of originality that resists easy measurement.
Eikhof complicated any simple celebration of instinct. Judgments about what feels “safe,” she argued, frequently reproduce privilege, penalizing filmmakers who lack family connections, financial security or fluency in the industry’s preferred pitching language.
Follows’ research suggested that 70% of this century’s top films involved a director, writer or lead performer with a pre-existing family connection to the business. Three-quarters of debut directors, meanwhile, do not make a second feature within five years, although collaboration with an experienced producer materially improves that prospect.
The panel’s underlying divide was therefore not data versus intuition, but power, whose evidence is treated as authoritative, whose confidence is mistaken for competence and whose unfamiliarity is coded as risk. Data can reveal structural exclusion, but it becomes dangerous when it lends scientific gloss to subjective gatekeeping.
From eco-horror to games, projects seek routes to production
The tension between originality and finance was visible in Alliance 4 Development, where formally distinctive projects arrived with sharply defined partnership needs. Tamer Ruggli’s Cuore matto, a bilingual queer and feminist musical set in 1969 Switzerland, was seeking French, Italian and Belgian partners.
Bruce LaBruce’s € Third Take, with Monica Bellucci and Béatrice Dalle attached as former lovers reunited during a chaotic film shoot, needed a lead Italian producer to unlock either a bilateral French-Italian structure or a wider European co-production. Jessica Puppo’s debut Reign of Silures, which turns a dying Lake Geneva and its giant catfish into ecological body horror, was prioritizing a Swiss or other European partner.
Florian Hoffmann’s Yazz, about privilege and moral responsibility inside a UN compound in the Central African Republic, already had Swiss, German and French producers attached and was using Locarno to refine its sales, distribution and international positioning.
Elsewhere, Claudia Rorarius’s Humanoid and Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino’s Yumi brought technology into intimate territory through stories of artificial companionship and parent-child surveillance, while Hilal Baydarov’s Stone Over Stone sought further European financing around a drama of debt, abuse and war trauma. The slate demonstrated why co-development platforms matter in a fragmented market, a recognisable hook may attract attention, but production depends on aligning creative identity with the correct national funds, expenditure obligations, co-producers and sales strategy.
The 12 projects in the Migros Culture Percentage Story Lab pitch were earlier-stage and more formally fluid. Samuel Vonäsch and Basil Sutter’s Hand Anthologie is a video game drawing on the hand game Morra and its migrant history, while Oliver Paulus’s The 24 Lost Wishes is designed as a 24-part digital Advent calendar seeking production and distribution partners. Several projects used highly local settings to address larger political forces.
Elias Bötticher and Simona Volpe’s documentary essay School of Minerals and Mining connects Switzerland’s commodities sector with Greenland’s contested rare-earth future. Noa Epars’s The Mine Screamed 22,000 Times observes the Swedish Arctic city of Kiruna being physically displaced by the mine sustaining it.
Flavio Araujo’s Habitat, still looking for a producer and additional funding, follows Zurich residents attempting to enlist bats and protected trees in their fight against eviction. Migration and inherited rupture also recurred. Jelena Pavlović’s Tamo Daleko follows a retired couple’s uneasy return from Switzerland to Serbia.
Julie-Yara Atz’s animated documentary Ma Maman l’anarchiste accompanies three generations of Syrian women back to Homs after the fall of the Assad regime, and Viktoria Filmako’s The Wrong Wardrobe explores exile through a woman managing her abandoned possessions via photographs and messages.
Uruguay builds a co-financing bridge
With First Look focused on Uruguay, the country also used Locarno to present an incentive system that is becoming increasingly significant to international producers. Its advantage lies in a layered ecosystem following projects from development and production through release and international promotion.
The Uruguayan Film and Audiovisual Agency’s selective Fomento fund supports majority and minority co-productions, while mobility grants enable supported producers to attend as many as three overseas markets or festivals to build partnerships. International projects working through a local company can also access the Uruguay Audiovisual Program, including a cash rebate of up to 27% on eligible expenditure and a zero-VAT regime for qualifying production services. A newly introduced transferable tax credit adds up to 30% of eligible Uruguayan expenditure and is intended to expand capacity beyond the cash-rebate programme’s finite allocation.
The country’s treaty network is equally important. Uruguay participates in the Ibero-American co-production framework and has bilateral arrangements with Argentina, Canada, France, Italy and Belgium, as well as a Brazil-Uruguay protocol supporting two projects annually. Proposed initiatives with Italy and Portugal and discussion of a Mercosur fund point to a wider strategy of positioning Uruguay as a stable bridge between Latin American and European finance.
Producers acknowledged that territorial-spend requirements make already complex multinational plans harder to assemble, while Uruguay’s small domestic market cannot resolve distribution by itself. But continuity across political administrations, experienced crews and the ability to participate as either majority or minority partner have given the country a role disproportionate to its size.
Streamers emerge as a fourth pillar for Swiss production
Switzerland, meanwhile, is testing whether regulation can bring global platforms more directly into the national production ecosystem. Since 2024, qualifying streaming services and foreign broadcasters have been required to invest 4% of their Swiss turnover in local films, series or eligible promotional activity, or ultimately pay a substitute levy.
The 22 companies covered by the measure generated CHF817 million in qualifying revenue in 2025, creating an obligation of almost CHF33 million. They invested CHF19.9 million, a 25% annual increase but still only 61% of the target, with deferred spending to be made up during the four-year investment cycle. Of that total, CHF12 million went into the production or acquisition of Swiss works, series attracted CHF7.4 million and features CHF4.6 million.
This capital does not pass through the Federal Office of Culture. Producers negotiate directly with the platforms, which have so far tended to favor rights acquisitions and limited licenses over assuming full commissioning risk. Documentary series The Belonging, backed by Sky, blue and the Teleproduction Fund after receiving public support during its initial development as a feature, offered one illustration of the system’s potential, once commercial partners joined, production moved rapidly outside the usual combination of federal funding and public television. It also demonstrated a new layer of challenges requiring the producer to reconcile separate commercial contracts.
The initial investment pattern exposes clear blind spots. Fiction dominates, while animation and Italian-language productions have attracted almost no platform spending. The question is therefore not only whether the obligation will generate the required volume, but which sections of Switzerland’s multilingual production culture commercial investors will consider valuable.
For international projects, the country’s dedicated minority co-production scheme provides another route. A CHF2 million selective fund works alongside the PICS expenditure incentive, allowing federal support to cover up to 70% of qualifying costs. A point system rewards meaningful Swiss participation, reciprocity, advanced financing, credible distribution plans and gender balance, with a Swiss share of roughly 30% occupying the preferred range.
The scheme has produced encouraging outcomes, 15% of supported minority co-productions achieved both significant theatrical and festival performance, compared with 3% in an earlier sample of nationally led films. Producers nevertheless warned that rising score thresholds and reciprocity requirements can favor established companies.
Open Doors shifts the focus from films to ecosystems
The need to finance more than individual projects was stated most forcefully during an Open Doors panel with Black Mic Mac’s Nicola Ofoego, Outside founder Darcy Heusel and Ugandan producer Samuel Tebandeke. Their discussion argued that the future of filmmaking across Africa depends on investment throughout the value chain of creative producing, professional development, finance, audience data, distribution and exhibition.
Tebandeke described the Great Lakes Creative Producers Lab as a response to the scarcity of accessible producing knowledge in East Africa. Its ambition is to develop creative producers capable of shaping stories, finance, co-production and audience strategy rather than training production managers concerned primarily with logistics.
His fintech start-up Kiasi aims to address the next obstacle through a regulated equity-crowdfunding platform connecting projects with retail investors, institutions and grant-makers, including filmmakers unable to afford repeated travel to international markets.
Ofoego said Black Mic Mac, part of France’s Logical Pictures, had reached a similar conclusion after working across projects from the commercially oriented pan-African co-production 3 Cold Dishes to arthouse acquisitions. Individual films will remain fragile, she suggested, without accessible film schools, confident production companies, specialized distributors and other durable institutions. The proposed Logical African Stories vehicle is therefore expected to consider infrastructure as well as content.
Heusel described audience itself as infrastructure. Her company Outside is building a connected slate for Black and African-diaspora audiences, allowing films to share cultural partners, market knowledge and fan communities rather than repeatedly beginning outreach from zero.
A small and engaged community, she argued, can be more useful than a large but passive social media following. The equity-oriented Next Narrative Fund, whose development call attracted more than 2,000 submissions, is similarly looking for culturally specific stories capable of travelling commercially.
The panel challenged a system that often develops African films with festival programmers in mind while delaying contact with their first potential audience, the communities represented on screen, until release. Community venues, event screenings and portable exhibition models can reach viewers beyond major cities, but the lack of dependable admissions, sales and streaming data makes those audiences difficult to value and deprives investors of credible comparables.
Images courtesy of Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press.