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 Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's 'The Green Eyes' before approximately 8,000 spectators on the Piazza Grande in the lakeside Swiss town.
- Giona A. Nazzaro, the festival's Artistic Director, frames his mission as liberating viewers from 'preconceived viewing choices' — building a public space where 'your algorithm does not work anymore.'
- Set in France's Landes region, opening film 'The Green Eyes' dramatizes 'resignation syndrome' — trauma-induced catatonia first observed in Sweden in the 1990s among asylum-seeker children — and lands amid coverage of mass crossings from Morocco into Spain's Ceuta enclave.
- Isabella Rossellini receives Locarno's Excellence Award, joined by honorees Darren Aronofsky, Virginie Efira, James Gray, Asia Argento, Rick Baker, Zoe Saldaña, and producer Sigurjón 'Joni' Sighvatsson.
- The 'Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist' retrospective explores McCarthyism-era blacklisted filmmakers, screening restored prints of David Lynch's 'Wild at Heart,' Martin Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver' and a new 4K Kevin Costner 'Dances With Wolves' on the Piazza Grande.
- The newly restored 'Dances With Wolves' 4K cut adds 30 minutes of previously unseen footage, pushing the runtime to just under four hours; Nazzaro calls the Costner Western 'an antidote to current U.S. politics.'
- Nazzaro flags the absence of studio pictures at Locarno 79 — a trend sweeping the European festival circuit — while crediting auteur projects like Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' with keeping Hollywood's 'collective intelligence' alive.
Why it matters: Nazzaro is making Locarno's curatorial identity explicitly oppositional — to algorithmic viewing and to the studio system's retreat from European festivals. Pairing a McCarthyism blacklist retrospective with his framing of 'Dances With Wolves' as 'an antidote to current U.S. politics' makes the political edge unmistakable.
