Let’s Regain the World One Film at a Time

Building the program of the Locarno Film Festival means engaging with the living matter of contemporary cinema. A cinema that unfolds while the world is undergoing violent upheavals, while we witness – in real time – horrors that we had only read about in history books or studied in archival footage. The question is simple, and brutal in its inevitability: what is the place of cinema when the proliferation of images is unstoppable and continuous? What is the difference – qualitative, ethical, political – between an image and a cinema image? Where does the indistinct flow of images end and where does the possibility of identifying, once again, the things of the world begin? After all – without ever forgetting Roberto Rossellini – we work for humanity. We regain the world (and perhaps peace) one film at a time. Cinema is a popular art, especially in its most avant-garde forms. It is the search to account for the possibilities of another possible world. The cinema that presents itself at the crossroads with history for the 78th edition of the Festival is a cinema that, on the one hand, does not turn its gaze away from reality, and, on the other, explores the still possible forms of the image without forgetting to smile at the absurdities of our lives. A cinema that is playful, takes risks, dreams, and provokes; a cinema that stubbornly remains in the world. Looking onward, alongside all human beings.

Giona A. Nazzaro
Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival