Film Festival A quarter more visitors at half-time in Locarno

A quarter more Piazza visitors compared to last year, hot nights and a rousing Indian superstar receiving a lifetime achievement award: The Locarno Film Festival can look back on a good first half of the festival.

Up to and including Sunday evening, 25 percent more people have visited the Piazza Grande compared to the previous year. If you include the pre-festival, which has been extended by one evening, the number of visitors is 40 percent higher, as the Festival's Commercial Director Raphaël Brunschwig explained to the Keystone-SDA news agency.

The film festival also recorded a slight increase in attendance of four percent in the auditoriums. Overall, the number of visitors rose by 18.6 percent.

The beautiful summer nights probably helped: While last year the first week of the festival was characterized by unstable weather, the Locarno Film Festival was lucky with the weather this year.