Call for Applications: Spring Academy 2025

Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel are the mentors for this year’s edition of the Spring Academy (23 February – 3 March, 2025), a ten-day immersive filmmaking workshop by the Locarno Film Festival. Six emerging filmmakers, chosen through a global call for submissions, will collaborate with the celebrated duo of filmmakers to make their own short films. The starting point will be the phrase “Demain, il y aura quelque chose de nouveau” (“Tomorrow There’ll Be Something New”). The Spring Academy is organized by the Locarno Film Festival and CISA Film Academy, in collaboration with the Ticino Film Commission and with the support of RSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera and Hotel du Lac.

Following the success of workshops held by Béla Tarr, Michelangelo Frammartino, Radu Jude, and Alice Diop, the Locarno Film Festival redoubles its commitment to fostering new talent with a new edition of the workshop, this time led by the French filmmaking duo Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel. Titled Tomorrow, the workshop will be a unique opportunity for young international filmmakers to test themselves, working with professional and non-professional actors from Ticino, Switzerland and working quickly under the invaluable guidance of the filmmaking duo, who have always experimented with the languages of the future, imagining complex new worlds.

The selected young filmmakers will conceive and produce their short films during a theoretical and practical workshop, in which Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel will help direct six actors specifically identified according to the needs of the individual filmmakers. The six films will later be presented in an exclusive evening at the 78th Locarno Film Festival (6-16 August, 2025).

Caroline Poggi was born in Ajaccio in 1990. She studied in Paris VII and then at the University of Corsica. Jonathan Vinel was born in Toulouse in 1988 and studied editing at Fémis. They have made several films, separately and then together, including the short films Tant qu'il nous reste des fusils à pompe (As Long as Shotguns Remain), which won the Golden Bear at the 2014 Berlinale, and After School Knife Fight (2017), which was selected at the Festival du Film de Cabourg. Their first feature Jessica Forever (2018) was selected at TIFF and the Berlinale. Their second, Eat the Night, was screened in the Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival 2024.

Applications are open to young directors under the age of 35 who:

• have attended or are attending a film school and/or already have advanced training in filmmaking;
• have made at least one short film that has been screened in public;
• have a good command of English and French;
• are willing to participate in person in the workshop.