If you want proof that cinema is alive and well, you could find it last night (August 9) at the packed Piazza Grande open-air theatre at the Locarno Film Festival.
6,500 people turned out in the Piazza for a Saturday night presentation of a lifetime achievement award to Hong Kong and Hollywood icon Jackie Chan, followed by a screening of Joachim Trier’s Cannes Grand Prix winner Sentimental Value and then Chan’s 1985 classic Police Story.
Ahead of the event, the festival urged attendees to arrive early to secure a seat. By the time the gates opened at 8.00pm for the 9.30pm screening, large queues had already formed at the entrance and the huge Piazza quickly filled to capacity (while another 300 watched in a nearby cinema).
It was a truly mixed crowd, all drawn by clever festival programming and star booking: many Jackie Chan fans were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with his name and holding signs saying, “I Love Jackie Chan.” The square was also full of cinephiles keen to seen Trier’s Cannes prize winner.
Chan received a rapturous reception on stage, greeting the crowd in Italian with the words ‘Buona sera’. The 71-year-old pointed out that he had now worked in the film industry for 64 years, and thanked all the directors and stars he had worked with who have “made me look good.”
The Piazza Grande screening was also clearly a special moment for the team behind Sentimental Value, whose co-writer co-writer Eskil Vogt and producer Maria Ekherhovd introduced the film to the crowd. Screen bumped into them the following morning (on their way back from a morning swim in the lake) and both were delighted with the reception and large turnout for the film at Locarno. It was a memorable moment of real ‘sentimental value’, said Ekerhovd.
It had been a similar story the night before (August 8), when the Piazza Grande hosted the world premiere of Dead Of Winter, directed by Brian Kirk and starring Emma Thompson, who was in town to receive the festival’s Leopard Club Award.
All seats were filled well ahead of the 9.30pm screening, with more people crowding outside the seating area to catch a glimpse of the star. Many industry execs who turned up too close to the start time were unable to get in. The festival told Screen that 7,258 people watched the film – 6,500 of them in the square and another 750 in the nearby Fevi Cinema.
Gaza in focus
The Piazza Grande also was full on Thursday night (August 7) for a significant but restrained protest against the war in Gaza ahead of the world premiere screening of Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s The Birthday Party, starring Willem Dafoe.
A minute’s silence was held and many attendees held up some of 5,000 cards that had been distributed by local activists. The cards included the words ‘Stop Genocide. Words and actions for peace, against indifference’, and also bore a striking image of a blood red bandages.
At the end of the demonstration, which was organised without the specific approval of the festival, artistic director Giona A Nazzaro, on stage to present the film, acknowledged what had happened, saying: “We are with you, thank you,” which was met by a round of applause from the square.
For many attendees, it was a poignant rather than polarising event. Screen spoke to members of the production team behind The Birthday Party afterwards, and there was no hint from them that it had overshadowed the screening.
Disquiet at the war in Gaza, and the starvation of many of its inhabitants, has been a constant theme throughout the festival so far. In public speeches, many stars, film executives and Swiss officials have spoken up to call for an end to the destruction of Gaza and the humanitarian catastrophe engulfing the Palestinian people there.
It seems to mark a significant shift. For some time, major film festivals have struggled how to deal with protests about the Israel-Hamas war, amid sympathy for Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 2023 attacks and subsequent unease at the growing death toll in Gaza. At Locarno, one senses that the consensus of opinion has been firmly shifted by the nightmare scenes that have unfolded in Gaza in recent months.
Nazzaro addressed the situation on the first night of the festival (August 6), telling the Piazza Grande crowd before the opening film In the Land of Arto that – in reported comments translated from Italian - “As a community and as individuals, we have the duty to always keep our eyes open, especially when it comes to places where suffering is a daily struggle, and therefore denounce the intolerable destruction of Gaza and the terrible humanitarian tragedy that is affecting the Palestinian people through the systematic violence of bombs and oppression.”
Notably, one of the most talked about premieres in Locarno’s international competition has been documentary With Hasan In Gaza by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari, a look at the region as it was nearly 25 years ago.
Doing business
Elsewhere, Locarno has hosted a busy industry programme through its Locarno Pro initiative.
Locarno Pro is home to initiatives including work-in-progress strand First Look, networking platform Match Me!, co-development programme Alliance 4 Development, the StepIn conference, classic film focus Heritage Online, as well as initiatives aimed at young professionals such as the U30 think tank and workshop programme Industry Academy.
One focus has been the launch this year of the Locarno Investment Community, which aims to connect film financiers and philanthropists with the European film industry – attendees included the Prada Film Fund through to Axio’s Together Fund. Meanwhile, co-production platform Open Doors has focused on African cinema, the first in a four year cycle devoted to the continent.
Key industry figures also debated some of the challenges facing the film industry at the StepIn conference. AGC Studios chairman and CEO Stuart Ford told the audience that major streamers are “throttling” the independent film ecosystem by “significantly underpaying” for pay 1 and pay 2 licence fees because of their commercial bargaining power.
Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle highlighted the fact that 95% of films programmed at festivals will struggle to secure cinema distribution that allows them to reach an audience. She suggested that European public investment, much of which is geared towards production, also be used “intelligently” to support distribution and exhibition. “There is no point making the films if people can’t see them or find them.”
Element Pictures co-founder Ed Guiney, meanwhile, compared the state of private financing available to the film industry in the US with Europe. The US, he noted, has a “very active private equity market” but “that network doesn’t really exist in Europe, so it is hard for individuals who may want to invest in the film industry to find their way into it and to select the best projects.”
Locarno has also helped to drive business too. Hot on the heels of its well-received Piazza Grande world premiere The Birthday Party announced distribution deals across a wide range of international territories, with joint sellers Heretic and Bankside Films saying the Locarno premiere has added momentum to the global sales push.
The Locarno Film Festival runs until August 16.
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