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For the month of February 2024, the Locarno Film Festival will showcase 29 dazzling short films as part of the Locarno Shorts Weeks, one of its most highly awaited online spin-off events for audiences around the world, with the leap year bringing one extra day and one extra short film from Locarno’s 75th edition. All are hand-picked by the programmers from the three competitions in Pardi di Domani - the Concorso Nazionale, Concorso Internazionale, and the Concorso Corti d’Autore - as well as from Open Doors, the Festival’s talent initiative focusing on regions where independent filmmaking is especially challenging. All 29 titles will be available to watch on the Festival website and on Vimeo, ready to be discovered by audiences anytime for the entire month of February.
The selection features notable works such as Asterión by Francesco Montagner (Pardo d’Oro Concorso Cineasti del Presente for Brotherhood, 2021), the Cuban Soberane by Wara (Pardino d’Oro SRG SSR for the Best International Short Film 2022), Hardly Working by Total Refusal (winner of the European Short Film at the European Film Awards in 2023), and Songy Seans (Last Screening), the latest work by the master Kazakh filmmaker Darezhan Omirbaev.
“Now in its sixth year, our selection draws from the titles of the 2022 editions of Pardi di Domani and Open Doors, ambitiously striving again to connect films with ever more enthusiastic audiences waiting to be surprised and delighted by what they find”, writes Eddie Bertozzi, Head of Pardi di Domani Selection Committee. “It is a world tour that crisscrosses geographies and sensibilities: from the subtle restlessness of North American cinema to the distinct universes of Latin America, passing through the ever-surprising homegrown productions of Asia and the Middle East, and finally to the multiform variety of European cinema. Superstitious people claim that leap years are unlucky, but Locarno Shorts Weeks shines with optimism instead.”
Films featured in Locarno Shorts Weeks (1-29 February) are freely accessible around the world. Thanks to the support of Swiss Life, all viewers casting a vote for their favorite short film will be entered into a prize draw to win a pass to the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, scheduled for 7 to 17 August, while the winning film will receive the Locarno Shorts Weeks Audience Award, worth 1,000 Swiss francs.
Seven titles from the selection will be available for a further six months on Play Suisse, the free streaming platform of SRG SSR, with audio description in Italian, French, and German for the blind or visually impaired and subtitles for the deaf or hard of hearing, starting at the end of February.
* Available from the end of February on Play Suisse.
