The 66th Locarno Film Festival ended last week with the unveiling of the award winners to an enthusiastic audience in the 8,000-seat, open-air Piazza Grande.
Italian journalist-film historian Carlo Chatrian, the Swiss event's new artistic director, can look back proudly on this year's 11-day festival as one of the best editions in recent years. Yet when, soon after the festival wrapped up last year, his predecessor, Olivier Père, suddenly announced his intention to stand down, it looked like a major blow for Locarno.
Père had raised Locarno's standards considerably with a bold, eclectic and open-minded film selection. His shrewd mix of challenging movies, famous guests and more popular films was attractive to a large professional public as well as general audience.
Faced with his French predecessor's formidable legacy, Chatrian opted for continuity. "I always thought that to inherit a festival with such a good reputation was a real opportunity, but also a great challenge," he says.
"We wanted to prove we could keep up such high standards through our film selection, a selection keen to show cinema in its full diversity. We wanted to build up a fruitful dialogue between the cinema of the past and the cinema of the present, between indie and mainstream productions, between documentary and fiction, film essay and experimental forms."
A festival is a place of participation and sharing, a place for encounters, he adds. "Today we are constantly discovering new ways of consuming images; in the face of this flood it is vital to have some places where these images can still be talked about, discussed and hosted. Cinema is a fleeting, fragile art which is jeopardised in equal measure by the economy, by aesthetic judgments or simply by the evolution of technology, but it is still an essential instrument for recounting the world, and its diversity must therefore be preserved. That is our aim."
At Locarno this year, guests such as English stars Christopher Lee and Jacqueline Bisset and Georgian director Otar Iosselliani shared their knowledge and experience with the festival-goers.