Adventurous Program for Algorithm Era

Attending the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival allows you to embark on a cinematic adventure, if you are so inclined and if you desire to do so. After all, there are all sorts of new envelope-pushing and experimental movies to explore.

Or you can see the latest from your favorite auteurs. Among others, the 2026 lineup of the Swiss festival will world premiere Nowhere to Lay My Eyes, the new film from South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo (Right Now, Wrong Then), who is a former Golden Leopard winner at the fest, Canadian director Denis Côté’s Nobody’s Violence, and Sixteen Moments of My Life from Spain’s Albert Serra (Afternoons of Solitude).

Plus, there are screen classics, such as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, plus a 4K restored version of the extended director’s cut of Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves.

Of course, Locarno will also feature star power, with 2026 fest honors set to be bestowed upon directors James Gray and Darren Aronofsky, Belgian-born actress Virginie Efira, Rick Baker, the seven-time Oscar winner behind some of cinema’s most fantastical creatures, as well as actresses Asia Argento and Isabella Rossellini.

Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, who put together the lineup for Locarno79 with his team, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about underlying and overarching themes that audiences may notice across the program, actors as “living history of cinema,” and allowing people to be surprised and experience a sense of wonder in the age of algorithms.

When you unveiled this year’s festival lineup, you called the program “adventurous.” Can you explain a little bit why that seemed such a fitting way to describe the lineup?

Adventurous is the adjective that describes the experience that I was always looking forward to when I myself was visiting festivals as a cinephile or a journalist. I really wanted to explore cinema, and therefore I would go to wildly different festivals. And that is probably the reason why I’m here at Locarno today in this position. Locarno was always the festival that allowed me to be in different places at the same time.

For instance, if I were to go to Venice, I would see this kind of cinema. If I were to go to Cannes, I would see that kind of cinema, and so on. For me, in a place like Locarno, you have this opportunity that if you don’t care about just a certain kind of film, you can flesh out a program where you can follow your whims and desires and inclinations, but on the other hand, if you want to explore, you can also do that.

Today, in the era of algorithms that try to foresee what you will do in a week or so, simply because you clicked on a link and you read something, and then suddenly, in your feeds, this thing keeps on appearing. I wanted to create an algorithm-free experience where you can discontinue the expectations that you might have on your own behalf and push you into a situation where you can experience something else.

I know this sounds very aloof, but it goes back to the possibility of being surprised, the possibility of wonder. You see a film, and you say, “Oh my God, what did I just see?” And that does not mean that you have to like it. But for me, if you are taken out of the set of conventions that usually inform your choices, that is a reward in itself. I know this also comes from a privileged point of view. I have the privilege of working with an artistic selection committee that is incredibly talented, and with our privileged viewpoint, with our gaze, we really embrace a wide spectrum of possibilities.

This year’s Locarno awards go to big names again, and the lineup also features some bold names, such as Caleb Landry Jones. How do you think about the need for stars or celebrities at Locarno?

I wouldn’t describe it as the need for celebrities. The history of cinema is linked to the faces of the actors that we all love: John Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn. We remember these people not because they are good-looking. They are, obviously, but we remember them because they were talented people. Someone like Katharine Hepburn could read a screenplay and say, “There are 20 pages too many.” Someone like Marcello Mastroianni, who always downplayed his being this super-talented artist, had a photographic memory and could learn everything by the first read.

So, we need to make a difference between talents, stars and celebrities in the way we understand them now. Because someone like Marlene Dietrich is not just a star. She is also someone who could master how to address, for instance, the collective guilt of the German-speaking people during the war after the war, and keep the memory of it while still being the greatest star on Earth. So that’s a responsibility. And for me, actors are like the living history of cinema.

People remember the great films through the stories of what happened to the character in that film. We know that High Noon is a highly political film made by a European director in Hollywood at the height of the witch hunt [of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist], but we remember that film because it’s been incarnated in Gary Cooper’s body. Gary Cooper’s body was the messenger of American optimism, and now suddenly you have the very same American optimism that stands alone against a whole country, against a whole city, and he needs to fight for justice.

How about some of the big names that Locarno will see this year or bold names with films in high-profile spots?

The talents that we are privileged to feature on the Piazza Grande are all artists, such as Olivia Wilde [whose The Invite screens on the big outdoor square in Locarno this year]. When you read an interview with Olivia Wilde, you know that she’s a cinema person who knows what she’s talking about.

Caleb Landry Jones is also famous because he played [Banshee] in the X-Men [franchise], and the got a Cannes award [for best actor in 2021 for his role in Justin Kurzel’s Nitram], but he moves between different worlds of cinema. And then, for his new film, [the Locarno-premiering Down the Arm of God, directed by Peter Brunner], he put everything at stake to work with homeless people in Texas to tell us about the plight of these people who never sleep in the same place two nights in a row and what it means to be left behind. He spent some of his time as an artist living in the shoes of someone who might not even have shoes.

Also, Claes Bang, [starring in the world-premiering I Is Another, directed by Felix Randau]. How debonair can a man be? I mean, it doesn’t get more debonair than him. But every film he picks is carefully picked. He could simply be playing the good-looking man and get away with it, and nobody would complain. But the choices he makes are always against his own persona, as if he’s always questioning things: “I invite you to look beyond the surface.” The film I Is Another is basically about this – a good-looking man who claims to have done something, but did he really do it? Claes Bang always digs deeper. So it’s very bold for him to take a role like that.

Overall, the fact that we tend to think of these actors and people as just good-looking faces is a bit of an unfair assessment of what they do. Ultimately, we have so many nice faces, but only the talented ones stay.

Since you just mentioned a specific film – not that I want to force you to choose between movies that you all clearly felt deserve a showcase – are there any films that you were particularly excited to get or that you didn’t even think would be in this year’s Locarno lineup?

There are actually quite a few films. Among others, I’m very proud to have the Italian film Ketticè, produced by Luca Guadagnino, the second film by Giovanni Tortorici, who had his first film in Venice in Orizzonti (Horizons). Then I’m particularly glad to have A Margem Do Rio (The Riverbank) by Enock Carvalho and Matheus Farias, close collaborators of Kleber Mendonça Filho.

I’m also very happy to have Violence du Corps de l’Autre (Nobody’s Violence) by Denis Côté. He’s coming back to fiction film, quote unquote. I’m super happy to present to the international audience Wandering Trees (Alberi Errante) by Salvatore Mereu, a crucial Italian filmmaker who has the breadth of a 19th-century novelist. I would also point to the film Manhunt by Wayne Wapeemukwa. That’s a true-crime film,” but it comes from a specific place in Canadian culture. The director is a descendant of the First Nations, and the film questions the colonial myth of what is beyond the frontier and how this myth still affects people.

There are also other films that I’m very proud of, such as Tear Gas by Uta Beria that documents the plight of the Georgian people of standing up against the Russian infiltration of their country, or Revolutionaries Never Die, a film about the legacy of the magnificent Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab. She is this extremely interesting filmmaker. I wouldn’t call her a documentarian because she was a filmmaker, and she chronicled the Lebanese civil war. She was on the ship Atlantis when [Yasser] Arafat had to leave Lebanon and landed in Tunis, Tunisia. She also documented with an uncanny eye for the future the onset of the Iranian revolution. She was this living memory of what was going on, and the film is basically about the work and the life of Jocelyne Saab as a living archive. And [Jean-Luc] Godard himself used some of her images.

When you unveiled the program for Locarno 2026, you spoke about how several films explore the theme of community…

Yes, I think that stems from a sense of being threatened and being more vulnerable. I hope this doesn’t sound sanctimonious or corny, but we live in a moment where the future could be described as the Third World War in pieces. You have the war in Ukraine and in the region formerly called the Middle East – but middle of and from where is my question. Then you have Sudan, and then you have the economic takeovers of entire regions on the African continent. Plus, there is the erasure of civil rights, political rights, individual rights. So everything is coming together at the same time.

What stays is this lingering and very uncomfortable fear that you are being threatened in the individuality of what your person is, if you are not a white Western person, and you can feel how things are shifting around you. People are being singled out for what they represent to each other, and what we represent to each other is not something that we decided. It’s something that has been put on us from above by a global block of linguistic conventions of what we are.

This singling out of individuals is breaking up communities, and so people are really thinking about: How can we protect our communities? How can we come together again? But “together” not in a sense of let’s just be nice and cozy, cozy. Instead, let’s think differences, let’s think individualities, let’s think heritages, let’s think bodies, let’s think sexual orientation. And how can we bring all these things together? It’s not easy, but it’s exactly the thing that all these wars are threatening to suffocate. All these conversations that we need to have are being threatened.

In a community, there is the opportunity, the possibility to speak, to talk, to make films, and to make a film is to engage with someone else to say: “What do you think about this?” Can we have a back-and-forth? So, communities today are the last vanguard of what it is to have and care about human dignity. Communities today are the laboratories where we can still think about how to make it all together.