Film Festival A quarter more Piazza visitors at the halfway point in Locarno

A quarter more Piazza visitors than last year, hot nights and a rousing Indian superstar receiving a lifetime achievement award: The 77th Locarno Film Festival can look back on a good first half.

Up to and including Sunday evening, 25 percent more people have visited the Piazza Grande compared to the previous year. If you include the pre-festival, which has been extended by one evening, the number of visitors is 40 percent higher, as the Festival's Commercial Director Raphaël Brunschwig explained to the Keystone-SDA news agency.

The film festival also recorded a slight increase in attendance of four percent in the auditoriums. Overall, the number of visitors rose by 18.6 percent. This means that the figures are back to pre-pandemic levels, Brunschwig continued.

The hot and beautiful summer nights certainly helped too: While last year the first week of the festival was characterized by windy, unsettled weather, the Locarno Film Festival was lucky with the weather this year. Not a single thunderstorm has fallen over the Piazza so far.

Shah Rukh Khan's inspiring performance

The highlight of the first week of the festival was undoubtedly the humorous and energetic performance by Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan on the Piazza Grande on Saturday evening. The 58-year-old, who has starred in over 100 films in his 35-year career and is said to have 3.5 billion fans worldwide, accepted the Lifetime Achievement Award on Saturday.

The world's most popular actor showed a very humorous and emotional side in front of the 8,000 spectators in the Piazza Grande. Cinema is the most influential medium in the world, explained the actor and producer, who was dressed all in black. However, films should not be moralizing or intellectual, but primarily express feelings, Khan noted.

It was not only Khan's likeable and humorous manner that made Saturday evening a special Piazza experience, but also the passionate, predominantly female fans who loudly paid homage to their idol from outside the barriers.

Balanced Piazza program

While in other years hard action films and gritty movies have divided opinion, this year's program on the Piazza Grande was more balanced.

The opening film "Le Déluge" by Italian director Gianluca Jodice ("The Bad Poet") shows Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI in the last days of their reign and reveals what has almost been forgotten: they were also only human.

In cool, poetic images, the historical film captures a preliminary culmination point of the French Revolution without showing the revolution itself. The work - a real chamber play - enveloped the Piazza Grande in a magical, reflective atmosphere on the first evening.

The eagerly awaited new Swiss film "Electric Child" by Simon Jaquemet did not quite live up to the high expectations. In powerful, pulsating images, the film tells the story of a scientist experimenting with AI who desperately tries to save his sick child, crossing one boundary after another in the process.

Although not everything is entirely comprehensible, especially in the second half of the film, the movie raises interesting questions about the use of artificial intelligence, some of which are quite frightening.

The Locarno Film Festival runs until August 17.

SDA