© “Lucky” (John Carroll Lynch, 2017)
In August 2017, we were fortunate enough to have David Lynch grace the Piazza Grande's big screen, as a character cameo in “Lucky”, the magnificent Ecumenical Prize-winning film of the 70th edition of our Festival. In the frame, Lynch takes his place next to Harry Dean Stanton, the movie's lead character – who passed away in September of that year – and among the dearest friends of the great Missoula-born filmmaker.
“It is difficult to take proper account of the void that David Lynch has left in contemporary cinema. It is also difficult merely to list everything that will never be the same after him. David Lynch was a visionary, essential, daring filmmaker. Able to challenge existing conventions and in doing so allowed us to cast a glance over the threshold, behind the door. His visions – sweet, disturbing, terrifying – were never without his affectionate Zen humor, the result of decades of meditation and detachment from the pressures and hurries of Hollywood cinema. David Lynch inhabited a world of his own, to which he offered us the keys. We could enter that world whenever we felt the need or desire. He had set no rules. He desired only that we look with our eyes open. That we would think with our whole being. After all, to pay homage to one of the most beautiful and free films of his impressive filmography, David Lynch’s was “a straight story”. A pedagogy of freedom that used the maieutic qualities of dreams to rewrite the possibilities of the world. The unconscious as the shaping force of our reality. And cinema as the conducting element verses magnificent and sweet states of hallucination. At the end of the day, and this is probably the most beautiful (non)lesson of his cinema: to find yourself, you must first get lost. Maybe in a David Lynch film. And in heaven everything is fine.”
— Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno Film Festival's Artistic Director
