Giona A. Nazzaro on Scoring Caleb Landry Jones’s Passion Project and Why Locarno’s Lineup Reflects the Festival’s New ‘Curated Diversity’ Mantra
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- Giona A. Nazzaro unveiled the Locarno Film Festival lineup of more than 200 titles — almost half world premieres — featuring works by Hong Sangsoo, Denis Côté, India's Gurvinder Singh, and a sophomore feature produced by Luca Guadagnino.
- Nazzaro framed the 2025 selection under a new "curated diversity" mantra, describing it as a "curated multiplicity of possibilities" designed to counter algorithmic curation with unpredictability and surprise.
- The Locarno opener is Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's "The Green Eyes," about a refugee child who falls into a deep, dream-filled sleep after his father abandons the family to escape deportation.
- The competition runs two narrative strands — "community and family" and "the body" — with Nazzaro citing Romanian and Ukrainian entries and telling Variety he "can't recall a time when there were so many wars going on at the same time."
- Caleb Landry Jones's "Down the Arm of God" will world premiere in Piazza Grande; Nazzaro called it Jones's passion project, based on firsthand accounts of homeless people in his native Texas, where a pastor's offer to shelter the unhoused sparks community revolt.
- Nazzaro also spotlighted out-of-competition titles including Tunisian urban horror "Bakma," vampire film "Sundown" starring Daniel Bernhardt, Bertrand Mandico's "Roma Elastica," and Edgar Pêra's "Asphalt Guerrilla," which is partly made with AI.
- Big-name guests expected at the Swiss festival include Isabella Rossellini, Darren Aronofsky, and Olivia Wilde, alongside the filmmakers behind the 200-plus film slate.
Why it matters: With nearly half the 200-plus slate marked as world premieres and marquee names from Rossellini to Aronofsky trekking to Switzerland, Nazzaro is staging Locarno as a deliberate counterweight to algorithmic recommendation — pitching editorial taste, not engagement metrics, as the festival's competitive edge over streaming-era curation.
