Locarno Film Festival 2020 - For the Future of Films
August 5 - 15, 2020
For the Future of Films is the 2020 edition of the Locarno Film Festival. This special edition, designed to be a "year zero", gathering films and viewers in the great digital Piazza that is the world wide web. The audience will connect from all over the world to discover the premieres of today and support the films of tomorrow. The future begins now, and Locarno will always be on the side of cinema.
“A Journey in the Festival’s History” charted by the filmmakers competing for the Pardi 2020
The major directors of the projects selected for The Films After Tomorrow will also be key players in a new section for Locarno 2020: A Journey in the Festival’s History. The filmmakers of films “on hold” have been tasked with picking twenty emblematic titles to represent the event’s history. Their choices stretch back over 70 years, from 1946 to 2019. All of them will be available for viewing online throughout Switzerland, while ten titles will be shown in theaters in Locarno; these screenings will take place from 5 through 15 August at the GranRex, PalaCinema and PalaVideo. Thanks to the Festival’s partnership with curated streaming service MUBI, viewers in many other countries worldwide will also be able to follow along on this cinematic journey at the same time.
From the future of projects on hold to movies from the Festival’s past
The line-up for The Films After Tomorrow does not merely extend the horizons of the Locarno Film Festival to include support for films in development and production. It is now also the starting point for a look back at the past as well, through the specific tastes and visions of these directors. The filmmakers picked for the section have been asked to choose one film from past editions of the Locarno Film Festival that astonished, fascinated or inspired them. The result is the season of titles that form A Journey in the Festival’s History, a program that traverses the over 70 years of Festival history from 1946 to 2019.
The Selection
Alongside the good news of being selected in The Films After Tomorrow, the filmmakers invited to Locarno 2020 also received a list featuring thousands of films, specifically all the films that have ever played at the Locarno Film Festival, one of the oldest cinematic events in the world. Their task was simple: to choose one film each for public viewing. One film only, one that struck them, impressed them, fascinated them, inspired them; one with which they would craft a special program, A Journey in the Festival's History, which will come to life online and in cinemas in Locarno on August 5-15.
Line-up for Open Doors films screening online and in theaters is announced
Open Doors, the Locarno Film Festival section that each year explores the cinemas of countries in the Global South and East, fostering the development of a collaborative, independent local film scene, is pleased to announce its program of screenings for audiences at Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films. Even in this exceptional year, Open Doors will hold true to its core mission with Open Doors Screenings which will take place online, plus a new, ad hoc retrospective section called Through the Open Doors that will be screened in theaters. This will be as well as organizing activities for industry professionals in the Open Doors Hub and Lab itself, which will be held online from 6 through 11 August.
In 2020 the Locarno Film Festival’s Open Doors initiative for global filmmaking is confirmed, its scope broadened, with a rich and varied program of short and full-length features, new items and works from the past. These will be shown free online or with paid admission in theaters in Locarno and Muralto, in the classic Open Doors Screenings, now joined by a special ad hoc section named Through the Open Doors, which looks back over the initiative’s eighteen-year history.
Open Doors Screenings
For this edition Open Doors Screenings will be concentrating on the cinemas of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Myanmar, as part of the three-year cycle (2019-2021) focused on South-East Asia and Mongolia.
Final line-up of 43 short films for Pardi di domani is announced
The final selection of titles that from 5 to 15 August will compete in the short films section Pardi di domani has been announced. During the special edition Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films, the shorts will be available for viewing online throughout Switzerland and the rest of the world, with theatrical screenings in Locarno and Muralto. Twelve titles will be in the national competition, while the other thirty-one will compete for the international awards. Judging the entries – and awarding the Pardino d’oro and Pardino d’argento – will be the international jury made up of Kiri Dalena, Mamadou Dia and Claudette Godfrey.
After careful consideration of more than 2,200 entries, the Pardi di domani selection committee – current members Tizian Büchi, Liz Harkman, Stefan Ivančić and Head of selection commitee Charlotte Corchète – picked out the 43 short subjects which will be competing for the 2020 Pardino d’oro and Pardino d’argento. The final line-up includes emerging filmmakers from 34 countries around the world: from the USA to the Philippines, from Finland to the Democratic Republic of Congo, via Switzerland of course. The short films selected involve extreme variations of genre, subject matter and aesthetic, shaping a multi-faceted sample of auteur filmmaking.
The selection
The directors selected include a number of names already featured at the Locarno Film Festival, such as Sorayos Prapapan, a Competition entrant last year; Renee Zhan, who presented her films in 2016 and 2018; Octav Chelaru, one of the Pardi di domani in 2017; Gunhild Enger and Jacqueline Lentzou, who took part in the section in 2016. Others making a welcome return include Mahde Hasan, Linh Duong and Phạm Ngọc Lân, young directors discovered at Locarno in recent years thanks to the exploratory gaze of Open Doors in South-East Asia, and now graduating to the international competition. Other names already familiar to festival-goers are Zhannat Alshanova, a key player in the workshop for L’immagine e la parola led by Béla Tarr in 2019, and Hamza Bangash, who took part in Open Doors with his film Dia in 2018, joined the Locarno Filmmakers Academy in 2019 and in 2020 was the winner at the first ever Locarno Shorts Weeks.
Get ready to sit in the dark. Locarno 2020 - For the Future Films will come with the reopening of movie theaters, with a mixture of past and future, of history and a desire to innovate. And so, with competitions, rediscoveries and surprises, Locarno 2020 will host dozens of screenings in the city, in venues such as PalaCinema and GranRex, as well as the PalaVideo in Muralto. A surprise selection will get things started.