The 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival (August 5–15) selected 233 films from 69 countries, including 103 world premieres, for its lineup, from a record 7,759 submissions.
The celebrity wattage will be also considerable with Isabella Rossellini, Darren Aronofsky, Virginie Efira, James Gray, Asia Argento, effects legend Rick Baker and producer Sigurjón “Joni” Sighvatsson in attendance and receiving festival honors while also joining public conversations.
Zoe Saldaña arrives on August 10 for a Special Pardo and audience talk, Swiss screen and stage veteran Jean-Luc Bideau will be celebrated in Piazza Grande on August 8, while Goblin co-founder Claudio Simonetti will receive his tribute on August 6 before a screening of Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run.
Premieres will bring another wave of guests, including Olivia Wilde with The Invite, Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain with All About Corinne, Claes Bang and Valerie Pachner with I Is Another, Caleb Landry Jones with Down the Arm of God, and Kingsley Ben-Adir and Rob Morgan with Frank & Louis. Monica Bellucci, Kim Minhee and Anders Danielsen Lie are among the other actors expected to visit. Filmmakers Hong Sangsoo, Denis Côté, León and Cociña, Albert Serra, Beatrice Gibson, Erin Vassilopoulos, Ben Rivers, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, Vincent Grashaw and Edgar Pêra are also due to present their new work in person.
The festival´s main competition, Concorso Internazionale, will welcome Hong Sangsoo with Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, a Jeju Island family reunion starring Kim Minhee. Its modest setup -- siblings visit the mother they have not seen in a decade -- suggests another of Hong’s deceptively casual chambers for embarrassment and intimacy. At a darker frequency, Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence follows a solitary woman whose work for a mysterious organization involves assisted death. Ann Oren’s Objet A places control and desire in the hands of two visionary surgeons: she steals objects, he longs to become one.
Competition also makes room for extravagantly imagined worlds. Donkey Princess, from Chilean stop-motion filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, sends a princess across worlds after her father banishes her lover. Nelson Yeo’s The House on the Moon reworks the myth of Chang’e and Hou Yi as wuxia science fiction, with a fairy maiden journeying to the moon’s dark side after the legendary archer disappears.
Gurvinder Singh’s Rehmat weaves three stories of contemporary Punjab, with Naseeruddin Shah among its ensemble, Lê Bảo’s Hearing centers on a mechanic who installs decibel meters while struggling with the silences inside his own family, and Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming places a queer Ukrainian couple’s relationship, and one partner’s transition, against Russia’s invasion.
The Cineasti del Presente section may hold the festival’s most adventurous discoveries. Beatrice Gibson’s feature debut At Night moves through a crepuscular Paris where women drift between dream, fiction and reality. Ana Vaz’s Fire Flower considers cinema as a means of altering human perception and reconnecting it with non-human life. Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die treats celluloid as both political testimony and intimate memory, while Sun Xun’s decade-in-the-making, woodcut-animated Magic Atlas brings a magician into the sealed coal empire of Luocha.
Out of competition, Albert Serra will present Seize Moments of My Life starring Ingrid Caven, while tireless experimenter Edgar Pêra brings Asphalt Guerrilla, a reality-anchored tale of utopia and violence, following a quiet student into a terrorist organization whose increasingly bloody war against the system culminates in a botched double bank robbery and public lynching. The Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist retrospective adds a historical counterpoint, revisiting films made under political persecution.
Genre films traditionally are slated for the Fuori Concorso sidebar. Nikias Chryssos’ Bloody Tennis turns an elite academy into a pressure cooker where athletic competition becomes literal survival. Rebekah McKendry’s Sundown, executive-produced by Slash, reunites three generations of women at a remote cabin for revenge, only for their captive’s family to close in after dark.
Poetic provocateur Bertrand Mandico’s delirious Roma Elastica (pictured above) follows a collapsing actress to Cinecittà in 1982 for a science-fiction production that may be her last, transforming movie history into gaudy meta-cinematic nightmare.
The full line-up of the 79th edition of Locarno Film Festival is available here.