Locarno’s Director on His Love of Celluloid, Building a Community Around “the Pleasure of Cinema”

The Locarno International Film Festival likes to call itself the “world capital of auteur cinema,” and while the Swiss event cannot claim the star power or industry heft of Cannes, Venice or Toronto, when it comes to the celebration of pure cinema, Locarno has few peers.

For the 77th Locarno fest, which runs Aug. 7-17, artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro has again lined up an eclectic combination of established arthouse faves — new films from Hong Sang-soo, Christoph Hochhäusler, Radu Jude and others — alongside feature debuts and experimental shorts, and a bespoke selection of audience favorite from Cannes, including Laetitia Dosch’s Dog on Trial, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, and Claude Barras’ animated feature Savages.

But the films alone are not what makes Locarno unique. It’s the presentation. The primary attraction is the Piazza Grande, the main square in the Swiss mountain town, which is turned into an 8,000-seat open-air cinema during the festival. As a spot to watch the world premiere of Gianluca Jodice’s French revolution drama Le Déluge (Locarno’s opening night film), the 4K restored director’s cut of Tarsem Singh’s The Fall, or the Italian dubbed version of E.T. (part of the festival’s tribute to the film’s sound designer, Ben Burtt), it’s hard to beat.

Ahead of Locarno’s 2024 edition, artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about breaking down the borders “that should not exist” between arthouse and genre cinema, the “no-brainer” tributes to Burtt and indie producing legend Stacey Sher, and his undying love of analog cinema.

How do you see your job, as Locarno’s festival director? What are you trying to do?

In a nutshell, I hope to build a community. The overall experience of Locarno is part of this community-building process. The films are at the center, on the sides, above and below this experience, but first and foremost, it’s about building a community through the different gaze on the films that we share and, I hope, the different ways of relating to the filmmaking process and the sharing of film heritage.

It’s also about keeping up the creative filmmaking process, about showing filmmakers that can bring their projects, their films, here and they won’t be pigeonholed. If you want to bring your creative documentary here, you can do so. If you want to bring your genre film, you can do that as well. Over the past four years we’ve had success with films from Radu Jude’s [Romanian social satire] Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World to Canadian filmmaker Rob Jabbaz’s The Sadness [a Taiwanese body horror movie]. My idea is not only to find and support films for our Locarno community but also open up some of the borders between film genres and film communities, which I think should not exist.

Do you feel this film community is under threat, especially now with people watching movies on streaming services, curated by algorithms?

To be clear: Locarno is not about streaming content. That does not mean that platforms cannot support creative filmmaking, but what we are about is about experiencing films in a movie theater with a community. We are also big fans of film, meaning 35-millimeter, 16-millimeter celluloid. This year, we have almost 40 prints that we are showing, restored new prints and prints on loan from cinema archives. We’ll be opening [in a pre-screening event Aug. 4] with a 35mm screening on the Piazza, an Italian version of E.T., which will be a homage to sound designer Ben Burtt [receipiant of this year’s Locarno Vision Award]. It’s a special offering for the children in Locarno. For me, it is very important, also symbolically, that when we open the Piazza, for the very first screening, that we can hear the sound of the projector, the wear and tear, that we can see the light going up to the screen. You cannot stop technology, and we don’t intend to. I took a train yesterday and saw a woman watching something on her phone, sobbing. Emotion lives on, however it is conveyed – be it phone or platform. But I’m the artistic director of a film festival, so we are trying to speak film, to speak cinema. We are trying to champion that very specific experience.

But we are not living in some nostalgic bubble. My colleague, Marcus Duffner from the industry side of Locarno, Locarno Pro, will be presenting several talks and keynotes this year on the use of A.I. and one of the films in the official program is a movie made entirely using artificial intelligence. What I’m trying to say is that we are totally aware of the world we’re living in, but at the same time, we are film buffs. We think film still means a lot, especially to people who are trying to make their first film, because it’s a very powerful way to share ideas, to convey your ideas about the world. So going back to your first question, the idea is to create a community where people, whether they are making their first short film, trying to get their first feature off the ground, can look at Locarno and see that there are like-minded people who would welcome their work.

Is that idea of community behind your new collaboration with movie fan social media site Letterboxd, including the new Letterboxd award?

As a cinephile, I’m really enthusiastic about this collaboration with Letterboxd, because when I log in to Letterboxd, I see the enthusiasm about films from people that are discovering films I saw way back in the day, people are championing their taste for slow cinema, for documentaries from the ’70s, whatever. It’s a very erudite community that knows what they are doing and knows what they like. They have very refined tastes. Even when it comes down to more C-grade films or genre films, there’s always this very acute understanding of what a film is. And I think the collaboration with Letterboxd is extremely useful for a festival like Locarno. We hope it will have both a horizontal reach, meaning that it will bring Locarno to people that wouldn’t have heard of or come to us otherwise, and also a vertical integration, so that people in the Letterboxd community might be interested in taking part in Locarno events that exist outside the 11 days of the physical festival, like our Open Doors program [which supports filmmakers from under-represented regions around the world], like our residency program for people in the industry. I’m hoping it can snowball in a very creative and positive way.

Looking over this year’s program, what surprised you in terms of unexpected themes or subjects linking the movies in your 2024 lineup?

Thank you for the question, because usually when I get asked if there are red threads running through the selection, I say “no.” But this year, maybe because of the times we are living it, there are some themes that you might say are transversal, that cut diagonally through the selection. First and foremost, is the theme of the fear of an authoritarian world. You can see it in films about families, films about institutions, films about relationships that become tyrannical, and so on.

Another theme that we realize was quite crucial is A.I., in the sense of what does it mean to be human individuals, creative people, when there is custom-made software that can take out everything that we are or think we are, and do it better?

Another obvious theme is the conversation around the past feminist female identity and the different declinations of such identity in the present. I don’t want to do any mansplaining, but we have felt that this is a huge thing going in a different direction right now, with the queer sensibility, the LGBTQ+ sensibility, this whole post-feminist gender conversation is very of the moment. You can see that particularly in the short films we’ve selected, where these elements pop up. But also in competition with Salve Maria, the new film by [Spanish director] Mar Coll, about a woman, a new mother, who becomes obsessed with a case of infanticide and she starts questioning her identity as a woman, as a mother, and what is expected from her.

This is tied to another theme going through the festival selection: ‘What does it mean to have a family today? What does it mean to relate to a family?’ A film like Transamazonia by Pia Marais [about a daughter of missionaries growing up in the Amazon], asks this question in a very challenging way.

I noticed you are screening Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which premiered at Cannes and is very much about how an authoritarian society infects a family.

Yes, but we also have the Turkish film New Dawn Fades by Gürcan Keltek, which we are showing in the Concorso section. It’s a very psychedelic mystique film about a young person going through Istanbul, but slowly you understand that the city is transforming itself, that the society is changing.

Another film that plays with this theme is The Sparrow in the Chimney [by Swiss director Ramon Zürcher], in competition, which deals with a family that is on the verge of either exploding or imploding. It is another film where family and society overlap and blend into each other. Or there’s the Hungarian film Lessons Learned [director Bálint Szimler’s feature debut]. Here it’s a school which becomes the theater of what is dysfunctional in society, with a young child who cannot adapt to the authoritarian ways by which the school is run. Because authoritarianism doesn’t mean that things work, that the trains are on time, it simply means that you will be thwarted as an individual.

There is a film from Tunisia, Red Path, by Lotfi Achour, which tells the unfortunately true story of some shepherd kids who were killed by a gang of so-called terrorists, but the question it asks is: How do you live with this perennial violence — violence to your body, your community, your identity — that you cannot control and that disrupts your ability to live your life?

And, of course, there is our opening film, Le Déluge by Gianluca Jodice, which deals with the last days of Louis the XVI and Marie Antoinette [played by Guillaume Canet and Mélanie Laurent] when they are brought to their palace to await their fate as a new world dawns. It reminds us that even the concept of the modern republic was based on that brutal act. You have to kill the symbols of the previous world, you have to kill the king and queen, order to have a new world. I’m just naming a few at random, but it is a common theme.

It’s not like we were looking for these films, looking for these themes. It’s only after you track back from the extreme close-up of the selection that you get a better understanding of the whole landscape and you can see these threads going through. But it was not done on purpose.

But selecting your lifetime honorees was done on purpose. One of the surprises was Ben Burtt, the Oscar-winning sound designer on the Star Wars movies. His influence on cinema has been immense, but you rarely see a sound designer getting honored by a film festival.

We are good friends with Bernardo Rondeau who works at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in L.A. and, of course, we knew about Ben Burtt and we started talking. Obviously, I see the idea of giving the Vision Award to someone who is a sound designer, sound editor, might seem strange, but Ben Burtt is such an influence. On us all! It’s his sounds on everyone’s phone, on our WhatsApp messages, our ringtones. For years, I had “I am your father” on my phone whenever my son was calling. So I thought, how can we find a way to present what this gentleman has done for all of us and how influential his work has been? In the end, it was a no-brainer. When you see what this gentleman has accomplished, it’s phenomenal. Star Wars wouldn’t be the same universe without him.

Your pick for the Raimondo Rezzonico indie producers award, Stacey Sher, producer of Pulp Fiction, Erin Brockovich and Get Shorty, needs less explanation.

Sure. That was another no-brainer. If you say, U.S. independent cinema of the ’90s, whatever film touched your feelings, your emotions and your memory, most probably, it has Stacey involved in it. And you can detect her influence. I mean, for me, being a huge [Steven] Soderbergh fan, having loved Reality Bites and obviously bowing at the altar of [Quentin] Tarantino, it was obvious. [French film critic] André Bazin spoke about the “la politique des auteurs” but there is also a “politique des producteurs”. Stacey could have done whatever, but she chose her projects very carefully, the projects were almost tailor-made. Her understanding of the zeitgeist was phenomenal, poetic, and never cynical.

Sometimes, you know, when we speak about the directors we love, we forget that filmmaking is a collective process. Obviously, there’s someone’s voice, the filmmaker’s, which needs to be heard. But when the film does not exist, when it’s only a piece of paper, then you need visionary producers like Stacey Sher doing the leap of faith, risking the balance in the bank account, and saying: ‘We are going to do this because I believe it.” If, a year and a half later, you can be in the dark of a cinema with hundreds of people and enjoy a film, it’s because someone believed in it.

We wanted a homage to this act of faith of someone who supported films that probably no one else would have supported, films that defined the times in which they were released, which is no small accomplishment. There are so many films that are being made, but so few that define our times.

Definitely. I find Ben Burtt is the cinema of my childhood. And Stacey Sher very much represents the movies of my college years, when I first really began to understand movies…

I’m going to steal that for my next interview. And I’m not going to quote you. I hope that’s OK!

You are also celebrating the centenary of Columbia Pictures with a retrospective. A lot of festivals have done similar things recently as the big studios all turn 100. But you’ve said you want to give a different perspective on the studio’s history. How are you planning to do that?

Well, the first thing is that I don’t believe in “heritage films” because I think all films are in the present tense. If this afternoon you watch a film from the silent era, a masterpiece you’ve never seen, you will relate it to everything around you at this moment. It becomes a contemporary film. This is what we wanted to do with Columbia, what we’re trying to do with all our retrospectives. It isn’t about the past, it’s about the present. And Columbia was a very interesting studio. This idea for a retrospective came together very easily with [retrospective curator] Ehsan Khoshbakht. There is a great deal of cinematic wealth here that has been very tapped into. They have been restored but festivals never screen them because they are smaller films from so-called “lesser” directors. It is not true that we haven’t seen all of these films. Far from it. And it is not true that everything about film history has been said. There are films that have never been seen and that deserve a chance to be seen. Maybe the most famous films we are showing are [Howard Hawks’ 1934 screwball comedy] Twentieth Century, or Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (1934). We really wanted to pick movies that people have never seen.

And by limiting it to 1929 to 1959, we can focus on the films under studio boss Harry Cohn, a man that was supposedly a terrible dictator, but who had incredibly good taste and was so ruthlessly savvy about the business that all the films that he put his hands on were good. We are still talking about this work. So I’m not saying that’s condoning anything but this is a very interesting moment in history that can tell us a lot about cinema today.

We’re celebrating Columbia on one hand, but we are also celebrating the films of [legendary 1960s avant-garde director] Stan Brakhage. Now, Columbia and Brakhage couldn’t be further apart, but the idea is basically the same. How many people today have experienced Brakhage’s films on film in a movie theater instead of going online to find if anything is available?

The thing is, film has its own textual tradition. It has its own philology, and all of this is a pleasure to experience. It is a pleasure to be exposed to it. This isn’t a job, it isn’t boring, it’s a pleasure. So the idea, the substance, and the subtext of all of this community building is pleasure. Come to Locarno. Let’s have some pleasure together.