Locarno Festival

Locarno Festival

Piazza Grande screening venue
Location	Locarno, Switzerland
Founded	1946
Website	www.pardo.ch

The Locarno Festival (formerly called the Festival del film Locarno and commonly referred to as the Locarno Film Festival) is an annual film festival held every August in Locarno, Switzerland. Founded in 1946, it is one of the longest-running film festivals, and is also known for being a prestigious platform for art house films. The festival screens films in various competitive and non-competitive sections, including feature-length narrative and documentary, short, avant-garde, and retrospective programs. The Piazza Grande section is held in one of the world’s largest open-air screening venues, seating 8,000 spectators.

The top prize of the Festival is the Golden Leopard, awarded to the best film in the International Competition. Other awards include the Leopard of Honour for career achievement, and the Prix du Public UBS, the public choice award.

Since 2013, Carlo Chatrian has served as Artistic Director, and the primary Selection Committee included Mark Peranson (Head of Programming), Lorenzo Esposito, Sergio Fant, and Aurélie Godet.

The 70th Locarno Festival was held 2–12 August 2017.

The Festival del film Locarno kicked off on 23 August 1946, at the Grand Hotel of Locarno with the screening of the movie " 'O sole mio " by Giacomo Gentilomo. The first edition was organized in less than three months with a line-up of fifteen movies, mainly American and Italian, among which was Rome, Open City directed by Roberto Rossellini, And Then There Were None directed by René Clair (1945), Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder (1944) and The Song of Bernadette by Henry King (1943).

Later, the Festival del film Locarno presented movies and short movies by many international directors such as Claude Chabrol, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Verhoeven, Miloš Forman, Marco Bellocchio, Glauber Rocha, Raul Ruiz, Alain Tanner, Mike Leigh, Béla Tarr, Chen Kaige, Edward Yang, Alexandr Sokurov, Atom Egoyan, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, Gregg Araki, Catherine Breillat, Abbas Kiarostami, Gus Van Sant, Pedro Costa, Fatih Akin, Claire Denis and Kim Ki-Duk.