Conceived in 1946 in the aftermath of World War II, the Locarno Film Festival was destined to be a platform for the rebirth of freedom of artistic expression, and since its inception the event has hosted the boldest, most avant-garde and innovative forms of filmmaking. Lying between the mountains and the Swiss shore of Lake Maggiore, once a year the city of Locarno is decked out in the yellow-and-black Leopard spotting of the Festival colors to host an intensive, 11-day celebration of cinema.
The Festival offers films, talks, events, concerts and art exhibitions, creating year after year a multi-faceted community, local and global, that converges on Piazza Grande for the evening screenings. Locarno’s picturesque main square becomes Europe’s biggest open-air theater, where an audience of up to 8,000 people can gather to watch prestigious international premieres and enjoy a unique, incomparable viewing experience.
The Festival is a platform for exchange, designed to be a place where audience, industry players and audiovisual artists are free to mingle and enjoy together an immense collective experience. Thanks to its focus on the future of cinema and the intense conversations that surround the medium, the Festival has increasingy reshaped itself as a place of creation. A space where brand new ideas, images, imaginations and projects are developed, where training and cultural activities continue year round, aiming to educate the public and nurture the community of independent filmmakers and industry professionals that has grown up over time.
The Locarno Film Festival strives to incentivize training and support for artists, to investigate new ways of producing and using images, and to bring the people who make films into closer contact with those who watch them. Through the dynamics of creation and exchange set in motion at each single edition, the Festival becomes not just a space to discover different, geographically and culturally remote images and iconographies, but also contributes actively to creating new ones.
The Locarno Film Festival offering aims to expand the vision of its viewers, inspiring them and challenging their conventions and prejudices, by presenting films from all over the world that foster understanding between cultures and human beings.
Locarno is also a virtual space, however, which looks beyond the timeframe and geographical limits of the summer event to be there for its publics throughout the year in all kinds of new ways. A space for doing, seeing, celebrating film as an art form and for building fresh projects. Never losing sight of the fact that films not only reflect and illuminate our understanding of contemporary society and the world, but also open up a valuable window onto future trends.
