London Connect

Not many people outside of the film industry have heard of it, but the annual lakeside film festival in Locarno in Italian-speaking southern Switzerland is one of the world’s oldest such events, having been founded in 1946 out of post-war, forward-looking idealism. This year, Time Out visited  the ten-day event for its first four days and experienced something of the global variety and sense of discovery – many of the films are by first and second-timers – for which the festival is well known.

'(500) Days of Summer'

The jewel in Locarno’s crown is the nightly series of open-air screenings held in the Piazza Grande where around 5000 punters gather each night for screenings which begin bang on half nine (‘This festival combines Italian culture with Swiss organisation,’ as one of the staff explained it.) The opening film ‘(500) Days of Summer’, which opens in London on September 4, was a fairly saccharine American anti-romantic comedy which stars Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel and has the odd amusing moment – more interesting was the opening address delivered by the festival's president in a mix of five languages, Italian, German, French, English and Japanese (a nod to this year's packed retrospective of classic works of Japanese manga films).

'Unter Bauern'

The next day’s Piazza Grande event offered a more appropriate sense of occasion: 97-year-old Marga Spiegel appeared on stage before the premiere of ‘Unter Bauern’, a new German film based on her own 1965 memoir: as German Jews, Spiegel, her husband Manne and her daughter were given shelter by a German farming family, the Aschoffs for much of World War Two. Dutch director Ludi Boeken chronicles that period in Spiegel's life, from her family’s flight from the Nazis to the end of the war and liberation by the Americans. Although solid and mostly compelling, the film was unexceptional and even crass in parts – but it was rewarding to see Spiegel standing on the Locarno stage alongside 82-year-old Annoi Aschoff, one of the surviving members of her wartime host family.

‘L’Insurgée’ (‘Restless’)

The better films unfold in the festival’s International Competition and Filmmakers of the Present sections. One of the highlights of the opening few days was a French film, ‘L’Insurgée’ (‘Restless’), which stars 83-year-old Michel Piccoli (‘Belle de Jour’, Le Mépris’) as Maurice, an elderly composer who lives alone with his 18-year-old granddaughter Claire (Pauline Etienne) in a big, shabby house on the northern French coast. Both are difficult in their own way and communication between the pair is almost non-existent, although we watch as Maurice lays some World War Two ghosts to rest and Claire finds some comfort in a new relationship and some validation in swimming competitively. It’s the first feature by director and co-writer Laurent Perreau who realises a sensitive study of two characters on the cusp of great change in their lives: she’s about to pass into adulthood and he’s about to pass on to the other side.