Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films will open on Wednesday August 5th with First Cow, the latest film from U.S. director and screenwriter Kelly Reichardt, who will also be one of three jurors judging the international projects in The Films After Tomorrow section.
First Cow, the new film by Kelly Reichardt, deals with great open spaces, the physical ones of the Western, but also the mental spaces of an unexpected friendship that, as succinctly expressed by one of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, quoted at the start of the film (“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship”), is the very essence of humanity.
Over the following ten days, through August 15, Locarno 2020 will unfold as a hybrid edition, mainly online but also in theaters in Locarno and Muralto.
The Festival’s closing night will address the concept of isolation in a series of films whose forms and concepts explore themes such as the altered rapport between humans and technology, the practice of working from home – including as applied to filmmaking – and the unprecedented experience of the lockdown. On August 15, the Locarno 2020 audience will be able to discover the new film by Jean-Marie Straub, winner of the Pardo d’onore (Leopard of Honor) in 2017, La France contre les Robots (2020), plus a selection of short features from the project Collection Lockdown by Swiss Filmmakers: nine shorts by Swiss directors who decided to keep on making films during the lockdown, whatever the means, the location or the cast.
Closing Night Program
Special event: La France contre les Robots, by Jean-Marie Straub, Switzerland, 2020
Collection Lockdown by Swiss Filmmakers
My Mom, My Son and Me, by Andrea Štaka
Quasi padre, quasi figlio, by Niccolò Castelli
Fuso orario, by Riccardo Bernasconi and Francesca Reverdito
L’età del distanziamento sociale, by Robert Ralston
Lutto sospeso in tempi incerti, by Alessandra Gavin Mueller
Amen, by Manuel Maria Perrone
Arancione, by Simona Canonica
Oasis, by Lila Ribi
Revoir le printemps – Journal d’un confinement, by Germinal Roaux
The Jury
Three jury members will judge the ten international projects in The Films After Tomorrow, awarding the Pardo 2020 (CHF 70,000), the Campari Award (CHF 50,000) and Swatch Award (CHF 30,000). Kelly Reichardt, a prominent figure in the reframing of auteur filmmaking in the U.S., has to date offered highly original re-interpretations of American narrative genres in films such as Night Moves (2013) and Certain Women (2016). The Israeli writer and director Nadav Lapid, who in 2019 won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale with Synonyms and has established himself as one of the biggest upcoming names on the international scene. Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, a screenwriter, director and cinematographer from Lesotho who in his most recent works, such as the documentary Mother,I Am Suffocating. This Is My Last Film About You (2019) and This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019, winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Visionary Filmmaking at Sundance), has emerged as one of the most striking and original voices of contemporary world cinema.
Three directors make up the Swiss Selection jury, which will award the Pardo 2020 for the best Swiss project (CHF 70,000) and the SSR SRG Award (CHF 100,000, in the form of a promotional television campaign). Italian and naturalized Swiss director Alina Marazzi, whose filmography includes Un’ora sola ti vorrei, winner of a Special Mention from the Jury at the Locarno Film Festival in 2002 and regarded as a landmark in contemporary documentary filmmaking. Argentinian director, writer and artist Matías Piñeiro, who at Locarno presented Todos mienten (2009), La princesa de Francia (The Princess of France, 2014) and Hermia & Helena (2016). Lastly, the director, producer, editor, screenwriter and activist Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an acknowledged master of Iranian cinema thanks to films such as Sokout (The Silence, 1998), Safar-e Qandehar (Kandahar, 2001) and Shaere zobale-ha (Scream of the Ants, 2006). His film Noon-O-Goldoon (A Moment of Innocence) — Special Mention at Locarno in 1996 — is one of the titles that make up this year’s “A Journey in the Festival’s History”.
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