Locarno’s artistic director Giona A Nazzaro tells Screen about the festival’s selection of more than 200 films that address changes in the cinematic language as well as the changing state of the world.
“Films are still a sign that something like democracy still exists,” says Giona A Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival. “Films are expressions of people trying to communicate with each other. Even a bad film can be good news that such a film is allowed to be made.”
Submissions to the Swiss festival grew 12% for 2025, up to 6,300 films. Of the 200 selected for the 78th edition –including 99 world premieres—Nazzaro recognizes some common ground: “What we perceived from all these films is a concern about the state of the world, addressing this in many different ways, formally or dramatically.”
Especially in the tumultuous times of 2025, Nazzaro knows no film festival exists in a vacuum. “We wanted to be at the heart of what is going on with cinema as a completely autonomous, ever-evolving form. At the same time, we wanted also to be a part of the ongoing conversations about the state of the world.”
The festival will screen works from both Israeli and Palestinian voices – Eran Kolirin’s Some Notes On The Current Situation and Kamal Aljafa’s documentary With Hasan In Gaza.
He says those selections certainly aren’t about having one film from ‘each side’: “It’s about not looking away, if there are voices that still have the courage to speak against what’s going on, why would you not listen to that? My position is to try to support creative expression and individual thinking.”
The Piazza Grande screenings offer the chance for Locarno’s selections to a huge audience –up to 8,000 spectators nightly in the world’s best-known open-air cinema. Nazarro says curating the Piazza is “daunting” because “you are addressing the whole town of Locarno at the same time.
“We want the audience who has gone through a day of the festival to come to the Piazza and enjoy cinema and enjoy this moment where some of the most iconic talents will be there to receive their awards.”
The 14 Piazza Grande selections this year include Cannes hits such as Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, Sundance breakout Together, and the world premiere of The Birthday Party, starring Willem Dafoe.
Smaller films such as Mohamed Jabarah Al-Daradji’s the Iraq-set Irkala - Gilgamesh’s Dream has also earned a slot on the big screen. “It’s a unique film about childhood that feels Spielberg-ian in the best way possible,” Nazzaro suggests. “It’s a film about the power of imagination and the reality of dreams.”
He says every year’s honorees feel like a growing Locarno family – “it’s like the opportunity to choose another family member, ‘Can I have another uncle, another sister?’ I know that sounds juvenile but when I started watching films, it felt like those films I loved were made only for me, they were like personal letters.”
Nazzaro realised only after the selection was locked this year’s 17-film international competition selections “are about how we build more resilient relationships in terms of protecting our communities.
“In films for instance like Desire Lines [directed by Dane Komljen], Dry Leaf [directed by Alexandre Koberidze] and Solomamma [Janicke Askevold], on the surface they have nothing in common, but they all have a deeply humanistic approach,” he explains. “The human being is at the centre of these films, in situations that are never stable and always evolving, and these characters find new ways of existing.”
In advance of the festival, one of the more buzzy world premieres in competition is Radu Jude’s Dracula. Shot as a comedy drama and made as a Romania-Austria-Luxembourg co-production set in Transylvania. the film aims to explores the legend of Dracula through multiple lenses.
“Radu Jude is not an intellectual who lives in an ivory tower, he gets his hands dirty, and says, this is what cinema can be today,’” says Nazzaro. “It is quite easy to be intelligent and depressing, supremely difficult to be intelligent and super funny.”
Regarding Locarno’s Cinema of the Present competition section, which has 60% female-directed films for its 16 selections, Nazzaro points out, “Cinema goes in many different directions at the same time, and that’s something extremely comforting. It means you have to pay attention and you have to look in many directions at the same time. We want Locarno to be a safe haven for creativity.”
There is a wide variety in this section. He describes Eric K Boulianne’s Follies as a “crazy sex comedy”, and points to sci-fi film The Fin by Park Syeyoung and Italian debut feature Sweetheart by Margherita Spampinato which he says “stems from de Sica’s universe.”
Nazzaro, an avowed Anglophile, is proud to present a focused slice of British cinema history with the retrospective Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945 – 1960 – curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
“British cinema actively created itself as such after the end of the Second World War, with this nation traumatized by the Blitz that created, from scratch, an industry that willingly tried to conjure this new post-war British identity.”
Nazzaro joined Locarno in 2021 from his previous post as head of Venice Critics’ Week, has recently had his Locarno tenure extended until 2027, for what will be the festival’s 80th anniversary edition.
In addition to learning more about Locarno’s audience each year, he says he’s also learning about himself. “I’ve always gone to the cinema because I want to be challenged. I never went to watch a film hoping that I would come out the very same. Every film that meant something to me shocked me in a way.
He takes that attitude forward to the Locarno audience. “In Locarno, there is a real audience [the festival welcomed more than 152,000 spectators in 2024]. This is an audience that is curious, that takes risks, that is willing to engage with the films.”
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