The 76th Locarno Film Festival: Where inclusivity truly counts
So, I’ve just had an interesting couple of weeks at the Locarno Film Festival in Locarno, Switzerland. If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, you might know — and if not, you do now — that I run a film festival in London. In 2021, I was invited to take a delegation to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, and what followed is a yearly pilgrimage to different film festivals. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot about Locarno, but last year we decided that 2023 would be the year we visited this important festival in the film calendar.
Located in the south of the country, Locarno sits in the Italian portion of Switzerland, specifically in Ticino. The Locarno Film Festival is in its 76th year, each year slowly building on the remnants of the previous year. It’s a huge festival, bigger than you could possibly believe, which was illustrated by opening day when 3,000 gathered on a Wednesday afternoon to watch an almost 100-year-old movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lodger.” What made the film special, other than a recent restoration, was the accompaniment of a live orchestra. I found it truly mind-blowing that so many people would attend a screening of an old silent movie that barely gets a mention in modern society.