Locarno Meets

Close your eyes for a moment and think of the sound a lightsaber makes. Think of the sound of Darth Vader breathing. Think of E.T. saying he wants to phone home. All those sound effects are the work of legendary sound designer Ben Burtt.

At the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, Burtt was in town to collect the Vision Award Ticinomoda, given to celebrate his exceptional career as a sound artist in Hollywood. From a childhood spent tape rec...

Producers don’t always get their day in the spotlight. At the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, the Raimondo Rezzonico Award was given to legendary indie producer Stacey Sher, who is responsible for a genuinely eye-popping line-up of iconic movies. Just to name a few: “Pulp Fiction”, “Erin Brockovich”, “Reality Bites”, “Out of Sight”, “Mathilda”, “Mrs. America”, “Contagion”, “Man on the Moon”, “Gattaca”, “Django Unchained”, “The Hateful ...

This week on Locarno Meets, we caught up with Italian star Luca Marinelli, best known to international audiences for his roles in “M”, “The Eight Mountains”, and “Martin Eden”. Marinelli was in Locarno to serve on the main jury at the 77ᵗʰ edition of the Festival alongside some of the leading lights of auteur cinema.

We took the opportunity to sit down with the charismatic and thoughtful actor to discuss his early influences – incl...

An exemplary character actor with a distinctive face: that’s how Tim Blake Nelson is perhaps most often described. Yet beyond memorable roles in films by Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers, and Terrence Malick, Nelson is also an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, responsible for a handful of impressive works in a variety of genres.

This week, Nelson joins us on Locarno Meets while serving as a member of the jury at the 77ᵗʰ L...

Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner has one of the most immediately recognizable signatures as an auteur. Her films are known as much for their formal austerity as for their daring subject matter; they are films that – to use her phrase – “do not shout so loudly”.

Those are also the kinds of films that Hausner, as Jury President at the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, did not want to overlook in favor of louder, splashier titles. When s...

What are the ethics of AI art? Can it ever be a tool of artistic liberation or are AI systems inherently extractive? Should artists surrender knowledge of these tools or should they try to master them so they are put to better use? These are some of the questions that came up in our conversation with filmmaker Paul Trillo, who has been experimenting with AI technologies for years.

He was in Locarno as a guest at the ‘Future of Sur...

The Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra is an experimental artist in the truest sense of the word. Time and again, Pêra has embraced still-nascent technologies without hesitation and with enormous playfulness, as with early digital video or 3D. Whatever the technology, he then tries to use them as a “toy of consciousness”, paraphrasing Aldous Huxley.

In this conversation on Locarno Meets, Pêra discusses his latest work, “Telepathic Let...

In 1994, a young Swiss-French rising star named Irène Jacob and a legendary Polish auteur, Krzysztof Kieślowski, travelled to Locarno to present “Three Colors: Red” on the Piazza Grande, in front of an audience of thousands of jubilant spectators. 30 years later, Jacob, now herself an established legend of international arthouse and commercial filmmaking, returned to Locarno to present the film while being honored with the Festival...

French-Algerian-Palestinian actress and filmmaker Lina Soualem has spent the past few artistically productive years co-writing a TV series (“Oussekine”, 2020) as well as directing the celebrated films “Their Algeria” (2020), about her French-Algerian grandparents and their fraught relationship with their homeland, and “Bye Bye Tiberias” (2023), about her mother, the celebrated Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, and the women of her f...

Following a successful premiere at South by Southwest, 24-year-old Swiss-American filmmaker Freddy Macdonald, the youngest directing fellow ever accepted to the American Film Institute, brought his audacious debut feature “Sew Torn” to the Piazza Grande at the 77th Locarno Film Festival. 

We caught up with Macdonald on Locarno Meets during the Festival to discuss the unique genesis of the film, its many wild narrative twists and tu...

“I think a lot of my work is about aspiring to something lofty. And then failing at it. Which I find funny”, says Alice Lowe, director and star of ‘Timestalker’, showed on the Piazza Grande at the 77th Locarno Film Festival.

In a free-flowing conversation on her influences and artistic aspirations, Lowe – a major star of UK sketch comedy of the 2000s, director of “Prevenge” and co-writer of “Sightseers” – sat down on Locarno Meets ...

Joining us this week on Locarno Meets is Ehsan Khoshbakht, curator of a major retrospective focusing on Columbia Pictures during its heyday of 1929-59.

A centerpiece of the 77th Locarno Film Festival, this 44-film program redefined and recontextualized the legendary Hollywood studio during the tenure of its famously tyrannical president and co-founder: Harry Cohn.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Khoshbakht spoke about the work of...

After “All We Imagine As Light” triumphed at Cannes this year, taking home the Grand Prix, Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia headed to the Locarno Film Festival to serve on the main competition jury alongside the likes of director Jessica Hausner and star Luca Marinelli. While she was in town, we invited her to join us for a chat on LocarnoMeets. 

Kapadia took us through her journey from “A Night of Knowing Nothing”, her non-fiction m...

Actress Paz Vega – one of the most recognizable faces of Spanish cinema – joins us for a conversation about her directorial debut: the piercing childhood drama “Rita”. This remarkable work, for which Vega served in a multitude of capacities – director, writer, executive producer, and in a prominent lead role – had its world premiere at the 77th Locarno Film Festival to acclaim from the audience and the press.

During the Festival, w...

One of the most recognizable faces of British cinema, known best for “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz”, actor Nick Frost stopped over at Locarno to show his latest film, the centuries-spanning time travel romantic comedy “Timestalker”, on the Piazza Grande.

While in town, he sat down for a conversation on Locarno Meets to discuss the genesis of this one-of-a-kind new movie, expound on his admiration for director Alice Lowe – anoth...

One of the most beloved and influential directors of the past half century, Jane Campion – recipient of the Pardo d’Onore Manor at the 77th Locarno Film Festival –, joins us on Locarno Meets.

Campion’s is a career of remarkable firsts, whether as the first woman to win the Palme d’Or or the first woman to be nominated twice for the Academy Awards for Best Director (winning for “The Power of the Dog” in 2022). But her body of work ...

On Locarno Meets, we're joined by five-time Academy Award winner Alfonso Cuarón, who shared some candid thoughts about his singular career while in Locarno to accept the Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

In an in-depth conversation with the podcast host Alex Miller, Cuarón opened up about his new Apple TV series Disclaimer, starring Cate Blanchett, taking breaks from Hollywood with Y tu mamá también and Roma – that allowed him...

A film 28 years in the making and shot across 24 countries, Tarsem’s gonzo masterpiece The Fall has long been woefully unavailable. The 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival saw a new 4K restoration, done in collaboration with MUBI, premiere on the 8,000-seat Piazza Grande in Locarno.

For this episode of our podcast Locarno Meets, Tarsem sat down for an in-depth discussion of this great UFO of film history, telling the epic sto...

There are no words to introduce Shah Rukh Khan, the Baadshah of Bollywood, recipient of the Pardo alla Carriera Ascona-Locarno Tourism at the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. He is one of the biggest and most beloved movie stars in the world; for billions of people around the world, his name is virtually synonymous with legendary films of all descriptions – romances, comedies, action films.

When we caught up with SRK in L...