Locarno Film Festival preview

Geoff Andrew looks ahead to the popular Swiss film festival.

Aug  1 2005

The Locarno Film Festival – the 58th edition of which begins on Wednesday – has for many years been regarded as one of the more rewarding European events of its kind.

Smaller, less glitzy and certainly less concerned with industrial offshoots than A-list events like Cannes, Berlin and Venice, it's built up a reputation as an audience-friendly festival that manages to combine a degree of populism – every evening, weather permitting, movies are shown on a truly massive screen in the Piazza Grande to around 7,000 spectators – with an admirably adventurous, open-minded approach to programming that happily embraces all kinds of filmmaking from all over the world.

There are competitions devoted to new directors and video; strands devoted to shorts; a human-rights sidebar; a round-up (inevitably) of recent Swiss cinema; and, as always, a large retrospective: this year devoted to Orson Welles.

Moreover, in this the fifth and final year of Irene Bignardi's very successful directorship of the festival, 'Leopards of Honour' will be awarded to Abbas Kiarostami, Terry Gilliam and Wim Wenders, while John Malkovich, Susan Sarandon, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and UK producer Jeremy Thomas will all be paid tribute with various other awards.

This year's gig kicks off in the Piazza Grande with a screening of Ketan Mehta's Bollywood movie 'The Rising', starring Aamir Khan and Toby Stephens, and ends with Robert Altman's '70s masterpiece 'Nashville'.

In-between, hundreds of films will be shown, including a number of new UK titles.

In the main competition there is the world premiere of 'The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes', the long-awaited second feature by the Brothers Quay, and the international premiere of Dave McKean's first feature 'Mirrormask', starring, among others, Gina McKee, Stephen Fry and Dora Bryan.

Elsewhere, Mike Figgis's 'Coma' plays in the video competition, as does 'Shooting Magpies' by the Amber Production Team; Mary McGuckian's 'Rag Tale' screens in the Filmmakers of the Present strand; and on a more mainstream level, Gaby Dellal's 'On a Clear Day', starring Peter Mullan and Brenda Blethyn, screens in the Piazza Grande.

Watch this space for festival reports early next week.

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