Lav Diaz will preside over the International Competition Jury of this year’s Festival del film Locarno, running from August 7 through 17. The other members of the jury are Matthias Brunner, Juan de Dios Larraín, Valérie Donzelli, and Yorgos Lanthimos. The Competition lineup:
Shinji Aoyama’s Tomogui (Backwater).
Guillaume Brac’s Tonnerre.
Júlio Bressane’s Educação Sentimental (Sentimental Education).
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani‘s The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears.
Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12.
Pippo Delbono’s Sangue.
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s Pays Barbare.
Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition.
Hong Sang-soo‘s U Ri Sunhi (Our Sunhi).
Thomas Imbach’s Mary, Queen of Scots.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Real.
Emmanuel Mouret’s Une Autre Vie.
Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me.
Corneliu Porumboiu’s When Evening Falls on Bucharest, or Metabolism.
Albert Serra’s Story of My Death.
Claire Simon’s Gare du Nord.
Tso chi Chang’s A Time in Quchi.
Daniel and Diego Vega’s El Mudo.
David Wnendt’s Feuchtgebiete.
Yves Yersin’s Black Board.
“I think of Locarno as a frontier festival,” writes artistic director Carlo Chatrian, introducing the full lineup. “A festival that tries to explore what’s going on at the limits of the film spectrum, on the edges of the frame, to pick up the things that are just off camera but which somehow define the scene.”
Presiding over the Windows of Discovery Competition will be Hartmut Bitomsky. The other members: Tine Fischer, Daniele Gaglianone, Peaches, and Nicolás Pereda. The lineup includes 16 films, with 14 as world premieres and 14 first features.
Among the guests on their way to the Piazza Grande are Christopher Lee, recipient of the Excellence Award Moët & Chandon; Anna Karina, subject of a four-film retrospective; Faye Dunaway, recipient of the Leopard Club Award; Sergio Castellitto, Otar Iosseliani, and Jacqueline Bisset.
The Histoire(s) du cinéma section will feature restorations of Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) as well as a tribute to the late Paulo Rocha, whose first two films (Os verdes anos, presented at Locarno 50 years ago, and Mudar de Vida) will be shown along with his last, posthumous work, Se eu fosse ladrão… Roubava.
Chatrian notes that the Fuori concorso section “will include 34 short and feature-length titles, some as world premieres, and will open with a film by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness.” And the Focus on Syria “will include films never seen before, or that were censored, courageous films often made under extremely difficult circumstances, but which nonetheless proclaim their makers’ determination to experiment with cinema and new media as a way to tell the world about the terrible ills afflicting their country.”
And as previously announced, there’ll be a massive George Cukor retrospective and an honorary Leopard for Werner Herzog, including a ten-film retrospective and the world premiere of the four latest episodes that make up the new mini-series Death Row.
Update, 7/19: Boyd van Hoeij talks with Chatrian for Cineuropa.
Update, 7/26: “Alejandro Fernandez Almendras’s To Kill a Man and Isidora Marras’s R. Lorena will screen at the Locarno Festival’s third Carte Blanche, a pix-in-post section focusing this year on Chile,” reports Variety‘s John Hopewell. “In all, seven Chilean movies in post-prod will be screened at Locarno’s Carte Blanche.”
Update, 7/29: Victoria Abril, “muse to Pedro Almodóvar,” will be presented with the Excellence Award Moët & Chandon on August 10 and celebrated with a screening of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), reports Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli.
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