A Home for Transformative Thinking

The Locarno Film Festival’s success has grown from a powerful combination of the exceptional selection of films, living the unique experience of the town and its dramatic surroundings, and the imagination of the Festival’s team.

The brilliance and astuteness of our team stems from a deep commitment to the evolution of cinema. We see the potential in stories and narratives that describe the world and create awareness on the most current and contemporary subjects, topics, and concerns while they inspire emotions, feelings, and ideas at the same time.

At the Locarno Film Festival, we put filmmakers at the center. They can trust us like no other to showcase their work. We nurture and protect filmmaking talent. Locarno and the Locarno Film Festival are places of transformative capacities and possibilities.

Film and cinema are at an exciting and unique crossroads. Never have we had a stronger need for constructing narratives that describe the worlds we live in and the worlds we want to continue to create. Never did we have better tools and ways of producing, creating, disseminating, and discussing. These new and exciting frontiers are also markers of the changes in paradigm we are facing and which will define our realities in the future.

My belief and role as President are to help in the creation of platforms that nourish novel ideas and develop new thinking. Locarno has always been the cradle in which vital narratives are born and it has, over a long history, opened the world to important voices in cinema and to experimental approaches in creating films and experiences.

It is this experimentation and future-oriented desire that will continue to define the Locarno Film Festival in the future. More ideas, more concepts, more voices will find their home in Locarno, a home that will always be theirs and always shared with the world. Locarno is home to creative minds and to inquisitive and curious audiences.

A home for transformative thinking, a laboratory of ideas, our festival is the place where the future of cinema comes to live.                            

Maja Hoffmann
President of the Locarno Film Festival