Locarno Director on ‘Dracula,' Jackie Chan and Hosting a Film Festival With the World 'in Flames'

Yahoo

18-07-2025

The 78th edition of the Locarno International Film Festival has a lot to offer movie buffs. There is auteur cinema, both from established and new voices, big-screen classics, plus experimental fare, Cannes highlights, and stars like Jackie Chan, Emma Thompson and Lucy Liu who will receive fest honors.
Some of the more high-profile titles screening at this year's fest, running Aug. 6-16 in the picturesque Swiss lakeside town, include Dracula by Romanian director Radu Jude, the latest from Abdelletif Kechiche, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, this year's Cannes winner, Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident and Legend of the Happy Worker, which was executive produced by David Lynch and directed by veteran editor Duwayne Dunham, who worked with Lynch on Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet.
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Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro is the man who is once again in charge of serving up an eclectic lineup full of 'the pleasure of cinema,' as he likes to say, to festival audiences and industry attendees alike.
Nazzaro spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how Locarno78 will reflect the state of the world, screening a timely-sounding TV series, bringing the controversial Kechiche to Locarno and how special it is for him and Locarno to honor those big stars.
Congratulations on the great lineup. Any insight you can share into how tough it was to put together what looks like an exciting mix of serious art-house films, from established and new voices, more offbeat-sounding fare, as well as broader-appeal movies?
We were extremely tough on ourselves, and unfortunately, the selection process was also very harsh, because a lot of films that we loved didn't make the cut. Sometimes I say that the quality of a selection is as good as the films that did not make the cut.
In unveiling this year's lineup, you noted that the festival does not take place in a vacuum. How is the state of the world reflected in the 2025 ineup?
This is something that really kept our minds busy all the time, because we are all complex beings. As someone who belongs to a lineage of cinephiles, we always try to protect our cinephilia from the outside world, especially people like me who have grown up in Italy, where there is this ideological mortgage coming from our cinephile ancestors with political engagement and a political outlook on the films and whatnot. So we try to break free of this cage. But somehow, everything that is going on in the world keeps asking you questions. So, what really is the place of a certain film in this specific moment?
I really wish I could just be in my own mental space where cinephilia reigns supreme. But then you have to ask yourself serious questions: how do you pick a film and contextualize a film in the framework of a world that seems to be falling apart? I know this sounds a bit sanctimonious, because we still have the privilege of going into a dark cinema and watching a film. But how do we not abuse this kind of privilege, and how do we not make it just a selfish thing? I know this sounds terribly abstract because it does not have a straight answer. But it goes back to the fact that cinema is at its most political and free when it is completely independent.Locarno 2025 will also feature two films that seem to refer to the Gaza conflict: by Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari in the main competition and Israeli director Eran Kolirin's in an out-of-competition slot. Why did your team pick these two, and did you select films from different perspectives on purpose?It would be wrong on so many levels to think that one thing evens out another thing. It would be the worst mistake to do something like that. It would be terrible. We have a film about Gaza, because it's a film that was supposed to be Kamal Aljafari's first film, when he was looking for a friend in Gaza, around the early years of the 2000s, when the so-called largest open-air prison in the world was creating the preconditions of the unspeakable tragedy that we are witnessing today. And the reason why we picked that film as programmers was that we see a filmmaker who, while he thinks he's making something, he's actually creating his very own archive of himself, his family, his land, his homeland and so on. This material somehow got lost, and then Kamal retrieved it again, and it's a very fascinating story. And somehow this material has become timely.
We also have the new film by Eran Kolirin, who is an extremely outspoken Israeli filmmaker. That is not a film about Gaza. It's really a film about the Israeli and Jewish Zionist identity. It shows: 'What we were, what we thought we were, what we have become.' And it's a completely no-budget film in black and white. It's a film made in sketch episodes. And it's terribly prophetic in a way.Jean-Stéphane Bron is doing double duty at Locarno this year. He has the documentary in an out-of-competition slot, and his series , about the Iran-U.S. nuclear talks at Lake Geneva in 2015, which sounds so timely. It's not the first series you screen at Locarno, but it's still rare. How did that decision come about?
This is the second time in my years that we will show a series. We also screened, a couple of years ago, an Italian teen TV series called Prisma, which was a very big success for Amazon. The Deal is interesting. I got an email with the six episodes. I usually look into something just to have a taste of what it is. I was immediately hooked. Director Jean-Stéphane Bron is known as a documentary filmmaker, and suddenly he's in this environment where he creates this six-episode TV series about the behind-the-curtain dealings of the 2015 Lausanne Iranian nuclear deal talks. It's extremely interesting, and it's also eerie in a way, because when we picked it up, I thought this is a really interesting Swiss production about something International, and it looks a bit like 24 or The West Wing, this kind of American political TV series. Then history creeps up on you, and suddenly it happens again. History is quicker than cinema. So, we go back to your earlier question. We felt that history was urging us, pushing us, as if [to say]: 'It's not good enough. You have to do better.'
Suddenly, when we were watching, I was telling my team: We need to be able to ensure that the films we select will also tell, retrospectively, something to someone who will study what happened in Locarno while the world was in flames. I didn't simply want the idea that even with the world going out of balance, we were just involved in our tiny cinephile squabbles. We wanted to have films, cinema, that look head-on into history.Locarno is again showcasing a range of cinema today, including comedies and some outrageous-sounding films. Can you talk a bit about why it's key for you to not solely focus on serious, even gloomy, art-house fare despite Locarno's strong art-house reputation?
My team and I always try to create a program that is as diversified as possible. I don't want that after 11 days, people go back home and say the only thing they saw were long takes and people staring into a void. I want people to go on a ride, on a trip. So you can have challenging films and funny films, you can have documentaries, and you can have genre films, but not because of a high priest of eclecticism. A comedy is there because it's an interesting film. And if a film takes three hours to get its point across, and we select it, it's because we sincerely believe it is a film that needs to be enjoyed on its own terms.
As you can also see with Dracula, Radu Jude resists, stoically, the temptation to make beautiful films. And I mean that as the highest possible praise! And, luckily, we have extremely intelligent genre filmmakers who don't care about sticking to the rules of so-called genre filmmaking and go their own crazy ways.
Are there any countries represented in Locarno for the first time this year or represented again after a long break?
We finally have Japan in the competition again. For certain reasons, we didn't manage to get a film for a while, and it was really weighing heavily on my mind. I thought we should try to find one, because we receive a lot of film submissions, but we also actively look for films since all of us have a large network. And we found Sho Miyake's Tabi to Hibi.The new Abdellatif Kechiche film, , the final movie in his trilogy, is probably one of the most controversial selections for this year's fest. Kechiche, who won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2013 for , has been confronted with criticism of harsh and controversial working conditions on his sets, as well as a sexual assault allegation, which he denied, and a probe which was dropped. Why did you decide to screen his new film at Locarno despite all this? We are obviously all aware of what happened, the backlash, and the aftermath of it, and so on. But then we got in touch with the producers, and we had an opportunity to see the film. And the film is in no way controversial. The film is simply a reminder of the tremendous talent that Kechiche is. It's such a staggering talent — the film seems to be light-footed, light-hearted, and quickly made as if it had been shot in an afternoon among friends. It was like when you drink a glass of natural still water, which is fresh, and then you think: Oh, I never tasted water before. What I mean is I think the film deserves a chance. It does not mean that we condone certain behaviors. The official stance of Locarno is very clear on that. But the film is not about this. It's about something else, and I think it deserves to be shared. It's a wonderful film.
Let me return to the theme of the timeliness of the Locarno lineup and how it fits into the state of the world. Miguel Ángel Jiménez's , starring , will world premiere on the Locarno Piazza Grande. The film feels like a reference to our time's discussions about the power of rich people, given all the current talk about tech billionaires. Any insight on what made you bring that film to Locarno?
It's a very old story about a patriarch who does not want to share his wealth, including with his daughter and offspring. It's a story about greed. It's a story about living in a world of your own making. It's also very Greek. It's about an ogre that lives on an island, and everybody is willing to please this ogre. So it's a story that resonates with ancestral echoes. Willem Dafoe plays this character with extreme gusto, and he [channels] some great, great actors, but I don't want to give it away. But when you say [billionaires] today, obviously, there are those names that pop into your mind inevitably. And if people see it that way, I cannot say anything against that.
Locarno will also welcome some big names who will receive honors this year: Jackie Chan, , , Milena Canonero and . How did you decide who to honor this year?
It's really about the wish of having a larger family. As a Hong Kong cinema fan — I've written three books on Hong Kong — Jackie Chan is a dream come true. Lucy Liu is one of the greatest actors in the world. Emma Thompson is a genius — craft and talent incarnated. Milena Canonero, it goes without saying, is a Renaissance genius. So it's really not about the fetish of the names. It's really about the pleasure of having these people become part of the Locarno family.Best of The Hollywood Reporter
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