In the Swiss city of Locarno, in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, the 76th International Film Festival has begun, considered the fourth most important festival after Cannes, Venice and Berlin. The proof: the former artistic director of Locarno, Carlo Chatrian, was invited by the management of the Berlinale and, five years ago, he left Locarno to work as artistic director of the Berlin Festival.
Since its inception, to set itself apart from its major competitors, the Locarno Festival has chosen to give prestige to cinema from emerging countries, and this has become its strength, as this is how it reveals new directors; in the face of competition from commercial cinema, it has always given prominence to independent cinema, both in developed and developing countries.
Locarno, in these times of existential crisis for cinema, which is also involved in labor rights struggles between directors and screenwriters and the big film production and distribution companies, has taken a step forward. It was the first festival to accept films not intended for exhibition in movie theaters, distributed by Netflix and Amazon, quickly adapting to new means of communication and film exhibition.
The possibility of watching movies on cell phones and computers has created another type of audience: movie theaters show so-called commercial films released with advertising support, confining moviegoers to smaller theaters dedicated to auteur cinema.
There are already projects to turn the large movie theaters into spaces dedicated to other activities as well. However, the dream factory (as cinema was also called) will not cease to exist: it will assume different and more daring forms. Alongside studios and commercial distributions, there will always be independent cinema that is successful with young people or censored in countries with regimes of political or religious intolerance.
I got to know the Locarno Festival, in the 1980s, when it was part of Radio Switzerland International, a time when the projections in the huge Piazza Grande had the air of popular festivals and the space with thousands of chairs (today there are 8 thousand seats) was precariously fenced. with insulation cords. The square is open, you can’t even imagine having a roof, and there has always been a kind of compromise between the Festival management and the weather conditions. It is very rare for it to rain in Piazza Grande. We hope that climate change does not change this tradition.
The screen at the Locarno Festival measures 400 square meters and has become the Festival’s main strength and attraction. Before, the Festival’s films were projected in the garden of the Grande Hotel in front of a few dozen chairs. It was the Festival’s former director, Raimondo Rezzonico, who asked a local architect, Livio Vacchini, for an idea to attract more audiences to the Festival. And the idea was to transform Piazza Grande into a large open-air cinema. That was in 1971. With a huge improvised screen, much smaller than the current one, and 2000 chairs.
The first film in this huge open-air cinema was Woody Allen’s “Take the money and run” – and many people were on their feet. For the second film, chairs had to be found in schools. And that first time it was also necessary to turn off the lights in the square. But there was no other way: when the lights in the Piazza Grande were turned off, the lights in the adjacent houses were also turned off. No one protested and an attempt was made to resolve this problem. A phrase from the architect Mario Botta dates back to that time – “the biggest cinema in the world for smokers”. But today you can no longer smoke in that open-air cinema.
Important additional information was missing – The Locarno Festival is not just the Piazza Grande. Locarno has many movie theaters. Piazza Grande is dedicated to mass audience films. The films in competition, the shorts, and so on, are shown inside normal cinemas, not outdoors; in total, there are more than two hundred films.
The Locarno International Film Festival started on Wednesday, and we’re already in Locarno to talk about the good films we’re seeing.
* Rui Martins: journalist, writer, ex-CBN and ex-Estadão, exiled during the dictatorship. He wrote “Dirty Money from Corruption”, about Maluf’s Swiss accounts, and the first book about Roberto Carlos, “The Romantic Rebellion of the Young Guard”, in 1966. He was a contributor to Pasquim. He studied at IRFED, l’Institut International de Recherche et de Formation Éducation et Développement, did a master’s degree at the Institut Français de Presse, in Paris, and Law at USP. He lives in Switzerland. He collaborates with the Press Observatory and edits the editorial section of the Correio do Brasil newspaper.
** This is an opinion article. The author’s view does not necessarily express the editorial line of the newspaper Brasil de Fato.
Editing: Daniel Lamir
