Locarno Festival Director Speaks Out Against "Elite" Cinema

The notion that the Locarno Film Festival is reserved only for insiders persists. Festival director Giona Nazzaro brushes it aside with a wave of his hand. The prejudice that films from Locarno never make it beyond Chiasso is false—and always has been—he asserts just a few days before the opening of the 79th edition.

According to Nazzaro, the films discovered in Locarno often went on to enjoy success far beyond the shores of Lake Maggiore. He cites “Blue Heron” as an example—the first feature film by Canadian director Sophy Romvary, an intimate family chronicle that was acquired by the American distributor Janus Films after the festival.

He also mentions “Gioia Mia” by Italian director Margherita Spampinato, a portrait of Italian youth shot on a shoestring budget that became one of the season’s critical successes. “The problem isn’t that Locarno is losing influence in the eyes of film lovers. Rather, it’s that distributors sometimes lack curiosity.”

“We don’t choose a film because we feel it will cause a stir,” Nazzaro emphasizes. For him, there is no line between popular cinema and auteur cinema. “Cinema is, by its very nature, always popular,” he says, echoing a statement by the French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, who claimed to be making “popular cinema for the working masses.”

In Nazzaro’s view, talk of “elite films” is primarily “a concept of the market and money” aimed at categorizing certain directors. His ideal lies elsewhere: to see a viewer switch from a Straub film to a horror film and then to a Vietnamese documentary—all in the same day.

Don't Be Afraid of AI

Nazzaro does not harbor any fundamental opposition to artificial intelligence either. Locarno has already screened “Dracula” by Romanian director Radu Jude, which reinterprets the possibilities of AI-generated images, as well as “Cartas Telepáticas” by Portuguese director Edgar Pêra—an imaginary correspondence between Fernando Pessoa and H.P. Lovecraft, which was conceived using these tools. A new film by Pêra that utilizes AI is also featured in this year’s program.

“We have absolutely no ideological biases,” says Nazzaro. The real issue, he says, is political in nature. He points to the encyclical on artificial intelligence recently published by Pope Leo XIV, which he describes as an “extraordinary text.” “The problem isn’t artificial intelligence itself, but what we do with it.”

Rossellini Film Monument

When asked who would be the ideal companions for a film screening on the Piazza Grande, Nazzaro names neither a Hollywood star nor a contemporary filmmaker, but rather Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. Their daughter, Isabella Rossellini, will be honored with an award in Locarno this year.

Movies, he says, aren’t meant to reassure the audience, but to spark a conversation. “A film that shakes you up is also a form of comfort.” It reminds viewers that they aren’t alone in their concerns about the world.