For 11 days every year the Swiss city of Locarno dons a yellow and black leopard costume and transforms into a roaring metropolis of cinema. For the 65th year of the Locarno Film Festival, another layer has been added - one that symbolises ambition. Under Olivier Père's direction, it is aiming for the top.
And Locarno has all it takes: the Piazza Grande is a breathtaking open-air venue which can host up to 8,000 viewers; guests such as Alain Delon, Charlotte Rampling, Gael Garcia Bernal, as well as directors Leos Carax, Naomi Kawase and Johnnie To Kei-fung - all of whom received awards this year. But above all, there's an exciting programme.
With his wide-ranging programme, which combines the daring and the new with historical cinema, cutting-edge films with blockbusters, upcoming directors with established masters, and discussions with the stars, Père has found the recipe for success.
A new section was added this year: Histoirés de cinema, presenting restored masterpieces and documentaries on cinema from around the world. Many of the works in the competition blurred the boundary between documentary and fiction.
Frenchman Jean-Claude Brisseau's home-made, poetic and fantastic movie The Girl From Nowhere, which mixed fictional and autobiographical elements, was this year's Golden Leopard winner.
Jury president Apichatpong Weerasethakul saluted the work as "an exemplary gesture of cinematic freedom, beauty and courage". Shot with almost no budget in Brisseau's own apartment, with the director also playing one of the two main characters, the film is a delicate depiction of the friendship between an elderly professor and a troubled young girl.