Locarno Film Festival Taps First Female Board President, Maja Hoffmann

Katharina Huber’s “A Good Place” (“Ein schöner Ort”) which won on Saturday Locarno’s best emerging director award and best performance (Clara Schwinning) in the Swiss fest’s Filmmakers of the Present, a remote and untimely village sets the scene for an imminent apocalypse but also for an otherworldly fairytale. Or are these two one and the same? Huber’s first feature opens with an image of a forest fire, foreshadowing the dystopian tone of an elusive audiovisual journey where emotions prevail over rational explanations. Set to the rhythm of a countdown, this chaptered story sees Margarita (Céline De Gennaro) and Güte (Schwinning) – two women with contrasting personalities, juggle mundane tasks of daily life with disruptive acts of sabotage.

Iranian filmmaker Ali Ahmadzadeh clinched the Golden Leopard in the main international competition of the 76th Locarno Film Festival with his latest feature Critical Zone (Mantagheye Bohrani).

Marta Balaga The hype is real: Ali Ahmadzadeh’s “Critical Zone” (“Mantagheye bohrani”) has picked up the top Golden Leopard at Locarno. It has been a bumpy ride for the film, set in Tehran over the course of one lonely night and described by the fest as “a hymn to freedom and resistance.” As reported by Variety, Iranian authorities have been pressuring Ahmadzadeh to pull it from the Swiss festival – arguing it was shot without permission – and with the director himself banned from leaving the country. “Instead of actors, I worked with real people.

EXCLUSIVE: An announcement today from the Points North Institute will provide a major career boost to a diverse group of documentary filmmakers. 

Arthouse Crunch Over the last decade, theatrical arthouse markets have imploded soufflé-like. “We used to make 5,000 admissions per title, now the target audience is 500,” Peter Bognar, at Hungary’s CinefilCo, told Variety at Locarno. So, to close the gap and move hopefully into a little upside, having tapped subsidies and local TV pre-buys, producers are looking ever more to overseas public-sector coin, channelled via international co-producer partners.

The mystical and the industrial cross paths in this haunting debut from India, screening at this year’s Locarno Film Festival in the event’s parallel competition for first and second movies. It begins in an almost documentary style, showing the harsh, eerie beauty of Jharia, a once-proud mining community that’s now an apocalyptic ruin of a city, where toxic waste is dumped 24/7 and noxious fires burn just as endlessly. Midway through, however, Lubdhak Chatterjee’s film begins to change direction, as its passive hero becomes attuned to the natural mysteries lurking in the adjacent woods.  

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor Up to $20 million could be pumped into independent film production in Switzerland thanks to revisions to the country’s Film Act, which will compel streamers such as Prime Video and Netflix to invest in the local film business. A roundtable during the Locarno Film Festival titled “Swiss Film Industry – New Film Act and New Opportunities” outlined the changes that would come into force in the new year with the implementation of the revised act.

Marta Balaga You can approach old classics just like new films, argued participants during Locarno’s Heritage Monday panel. “I talked to an exhibitor in Paris and they don’t consider repertory cinema to be different from contemporary cinema. They are collapsing both models into one and it’s very interesting,” said K.J.

Climate change activists briefly halted the Locarno Film Festival’s honorary awards ceremony for environmentalist and documentarian Luc Jacquet on Monday evening.Jacquet, who won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2006 for The March Of The Penguins, was being feted with the Locarno Kids Award, followed by a screening of his new film Magnetic Continent in front of a 7,000-strong crowd on the festival’s landmark Piazza Grande.

Switzerland has selected Camille Jaquier’s coming-of-age period drama Thunder (Foudre) as its entry for the Best International Film category at the 2024 Oscars.

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor Swiss Films previewed four films to industry guests at a special event hosted by Locarno Pro, the industry section of Locarno Film Festival, showcasing generational range and genre diversity. The selection included the new film by Carmen Jaquier, the director of “Thunder,” which was announced this week as the Swiss entry in the international feature film category of the Academy Awards.

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor “The Vanishing Soldier” is a coming of age story, as breathless as its protagonist: the kind of film that will make cinephiles of seventeen-year-olds. Which is one of the reasons that Dani Rosenberg, the film’s 43-year-old director, is delighted to be in Locarno, where the film, sold by Intramovies, is screening in main competition, and has just got a trailer, and poster, shared in exclusivity with Variety. “We had options for other festivals,” Rosenberg told Variety at the Swiss fest.

Marta Balaga It was a good day for female filmmakers – and documentaries – at Locarno Pro, with “Mother Vera” by Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson winning the Creativity Media First Look Award on Sunday at Locarno’s pix-in-post competition, dedicated this year to the U.K. Dedicated to a young Orthodox nun, “Mother Vera” shows her turbulent past and fragile future as she faces inner conflict after 20 years as a monastic.

It’s rare that European cinema impacts on Hollywood but it’s exciting when there’s a trickle-down effect, like the connection to be made between Denmark’s stripped-down Dogme movies, which launched in Cannes in the late ’90s, and Steven Spielberg’s decision to go back to basics (well, for him) with Catch Me If You Can a few years later. It’s a moot point how many will ever see Romanian director Radu Jude’s follow-up to his 2021 Berlinale winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, but, like Bob Dylan going electric or the Sex Pistols making their ramshackle debut at a London art school, this wilfully uncommercial but bloody-minded film could be genuinely seminal in its anarchic and totally individualistic approach, slipping discordant, Godardian subversion into a darkly comic, Ruben Östlund-style human drama.

Marta Balaga Stellan Skarsgård and Gustaf Skarsgård introduced their latest film “What Remains” at Locarno Film Festival on Friday. Directed by Ran Huang, it was written by Huang and Megan Everett Skarsgård. Andrea Riseborough also stars.

Marta Balaga Alliance 4 Development – a co-development initiative for film projects from Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland hosted by Locarno Pro – is ready to embrace a “variety of genres, themes and visions,” says project manager Francesca Palleschi. Among 11 titles selected for its 8th edition, emerging filmmakers will be featured alongside their more established colleagues.

Ellise Shafer Diane Kruger is set to receive the Golden Eye Award at this year’s edition of Zurich Film Festival. Throughout the course of her career, Kruger has worked with high-profile directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Wolfgang Peterson and Robert Zemeckis. She is best known for her roles as Helen of Sparta in “Troy” (2004), Abigail Chase in “National Treasure” (2004) and its sequel “Book of Secrets” (2007), Bridget von Hammersmark in Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” (2009), Anna in “Mr.

Roland Emmerich’s upcoming gladiator series Those About to Die has been picked up by Prime Video across Europe.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Prime Video has acquired the Ancient Rome gladiator drama series “Those About to Die” in multiple European territories. The show is directed by “Independence Day” helmer Roland Emmerich and Marco Kreuzpaintner. The 10-episode first season will debut exclusively on Prime Video in Germany, the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Poland, Turkey, Andorra, Monaco, Luxembourg and Belgium.

In his first communiqué as Sundance’s Festival Director, Eugene Hernandez has doled out new information as far as the slate and venues for 2024, also addressing the timing of programming and a “challenging moment” for artists, as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes continue.