Locarno Film Festival Head Giona A. Nazzaro Talks Mission To Liberate Spectators In The Age Of The Algorithm As 79th Edition Kicks Off
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- Locarno Film Festival opens its 79th edition with the world premiere of French duo Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's 'The Green Eyes' before 8,000 spectators on the lakeside Piazza Grande.
- Giona A. Nazzaro frames his festival mission as liberating spectators from algorithms — 'welcome to Locarno, where your algorithm does not work anymore' — and chose the opening film for its resonance with the Ceuta migration crisis, where tens of thousands recently attempted to cross from Morocco into Spain.
- 'The Green Eyes' follows an 11-year-old whose brother falls into a mysterious deep sleep after the family is served deportation papers, drawing on 'resignation syndrome' first observed in Sweden in the 1990s among asylum-seeker children.
- Isabella Rossellini receives the festival's Excellence Award; other honorees include Darren Aronofsky, Virginie Efira, James Gray, Asia Argento, Rick Baker, Zoe Saldaña, and producer Sigurjón 'Joni' Sighvatsson.
- Piazza Grande lineup includes Olivia Wilde's $40M box office breakout 'The Invite,' Monica Bellucci in Luca Guadagnino-produced 'Ketticè,' and Claes Bang in post-WW2 intrigue 'I Is Another.'
- This year's retrospective 'Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist' examines filmmakers blacklisted during McCarthyism; a newly restored 4K version of Kevin Costner's 'Dances With Wolves' adds 30 minutes of unseen footage, extending the runtime to nearly four hours.
- Studio pictures are absent from this edition — a trend Nazzaro notes across the European festival circuit — though Locarno previously screened Sony's 'Bullet Train' and he cites Chris Nolan's 'The Odyssey' as evidence the system still supports auteurs.
Why it matters: Nazzaro's anti-algorithm push positions Locarno as a deliberate counterweight to platform-driven content discovery, staking out 8,000-seat Piazza Grande screenings and a midnight, four-hour 'Dances With Wolves' marathon to reclaim cinema as lived experience. His acknowledgment that studio pictures have vanished from this edition — while still crediting Chris Nolan's 'The Odyssey' — reflects a structural shift in how European festivals relate to Hollywood, with Nazzaro openly questioning 'whether there is still something like a studio system.'
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