Zoe Saldaña arrived at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival carrying the kind of résumé that can flatten a public conversation into celebration: An Academy Award for Emilia Pérez, three major science-fiction franchises, and a body of work whose scale is almost without contemporary parallel.
Locarno gave her a Special Pardo. Saldaña used the occasion less as a victory lap than as an argument against the boxes that decide what an actor is allowed to want.
The argument began with The Absence of Eden, directed by her husband, Marco Perego. The film grew from their visits to the US–Mexico border and from Perego’s recognition that his own experience as a European immigrant differed sharply from that of migrants of color.
Saldaña resisted reducing the project to a position paper. “I don’t think that Marco is aiming to be political,” she said. “Marco is always aiming to be human.” Then came the sting: “Art just being compassionate is being political, unfortunately, these days.”
That preference for human experience over category also shaped her account of growing up between New York and the Dominican Republic. New York offered a world inside a single block. The island brought a more homogeneous and patriarchal culture, along with language, family history and belonging.
The move was painful, but it eventually gave her material. Identity, in Saldaña’s telling, was not a branding exercise. It was something lived first and understood later, once she could ask how it continued to inform her art.
Ballet supplied the method. Its rigid physical ideal taught her the damage of pursuing a mold her body could never fit, but its discipline showed that the body could meet an extreme demand. More importantly, dance became language when childhood loss and displacement were beyond speech.
“Ballet became an outlet, became a therapy, became a friend,” she said. For actors and directors, the useful lesson is not romantic suffering. It is that technique can create a channel for experience before an artist knows how to explain it.
Saldaña carried that discipline into an industry whose hierarchies she once accepted too easily. Before streaming, she said, actors were taught to regard cinema as legitimacy and television as failure. Lioness helped break that prejudice. The expanded landscape let her keep working and pursue writers rather than formats.
“Good storytelling can live anywhere,” she said, on stage, television, a streaming platform, or in films of radically different budgets. For independent filmmakers, that is more than career optimism. Build the project around the form that can sustain it, not the form that confers status.
Her sharpest intervention came when she described panels where the only woman or person of color waits to discuss craft and instead receives the institutional question: How can cinema become more inclusive? Saldaña’s objection was not to the urgency of inclusion, but to the transfer of responsibility. Marginalized artists already work harder to enter the room. Asking them to diagnose exclusion adds another job.
The people whose race and gender have made their presence feel automatic, she argued, should explain which habits keep others outside. “You don’t ask the only person that comes from a marginalized community,” Saldaña said. “You ask the other 80 of them that are part of the gatekeepers.”
Saldaña connected Neytiri of Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy´s Gamora to her own familiarity with being isolated, othered and pressured to be perfect. Science fiction lets her play women who are warriors, scientists and leaders rather than returning automatically to the wife, mother or historical victim.
“The fantasy is liberating,” she said. Escape, here, is not an absence of politics. It is the freedom to imagine a person of color beyond the limited roles history has repeatedly assigned.
James Cameron’s work reached her before she met him. At age 7, she saw in Sarah Connor a woman given purpose inside a future that felt fantastic and foreseeable. On Avatar, that childhood response became process. Cameron, Saldaña and the ensemble can spend hours breaking down a scene across ages, races and performance traditions.
The spectacle may be technological, but her admiration rests on curiosity and the time devoted to shared interpretation. That is a practical reminder for effects-heavy filmmaking. The human scale is built during the conversation, not added after the render.
Despite the Oscar and commercial records surrounding her, Saldaña rejected the language of the five-year plan. “I’m not ambitious,” she said. “I’m an artist.”
Plans create pressure and disappointment, purpose is steadier. She wants to make art, connect with people, support her family and create opportunities for Latinos. None of that means lowering the standard. “It’s okay to demand excellence from yourself,” she added. “If you’re going to make a choice to do something, do it well.”
Directing is the choice gathering force. Saldaña and her sisters are producing and trying to option a novel about a Black couple in the postwar Bay Area whose marriage contains questions of trauma and sexual identity. She sees a universal domestic story that cinema rarely tells through a family of color, and one that could speak particularly to queer communities of color.
For now, she is acting, producing and making room for family. Yet she described the transition with the impatience of someone who has spent years studying other people’s decisions. Eventually, she will say, “Give me that camera.”
Her Locarno conversation suggested that the director is already present, in the dancer’s preparation, the producer’s search for material, the performer’s attention to process and the insistence that gatekeepers answer for the rooms they have built.
Image courtesy of Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press.