Highlights from the 2025 Locarno Film Festival

Locarno78 featured 101 world premieres from both emerging and established filmmakers with 224 films across 11 sections. Japanese filmmaker Shô Miyake took home the Golden Leopard for his film Two Seasons, Two Strangers. The American independent drama Rosemead received the Prix du Public UBS.

IN CONVERSATION

Emma Thompson, honored with the Leopard Club Award, spoke about her latest film The Dead of Winter directed by Brian Kirk, which premiered on the Piazza Grande. This action thriller starred Thompson, who also served as an executive producer.

Thompson recounted her path from being discovered as a stand-up comedian, to winning the Best Screenplay Adaptation Oscar for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. “A screenplay is a very interesting thing. When producer Lindsay Doran asked me to write it, I said I don’t know how to write a screenplay and she said ask around, so I went to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala who adapted Howard’s End and Remains of the Day. Ruth said: ‘If you are thinking of adapting, this is what you do: you adapt the whole book, you dramatize every single scene because you don’t know which ones are going to work and which ones are not going to work.’ Weirdly, some of the most dramatic scenes in the book are not dramatic on film, and some of the least dramatic are very dramatic on film. So I wrote a screenplay that was 400 pages long, and they need to be 100 pages long, obviously. I started to take out the stuff that didn’t work and then started to add things that we needed, because some characters just disappear, and you have to find a way of bringing them back.

It took five years to write. I got some very useful notes, like from Sydney Pollack, he was one of the producers, who said 'I'm a Jew from Indiana, I’m dumb, I don’t know anything, why can’t they just go and get a job?’ I thought, that’s a really good question. There were no jobs at that time for women in that situation.  

All screenplays take a long time. Nanny McPhee took nine years to write.  You keep rewriting it over and over."

Award-winning Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof received the First Locarno City of Peace Award, which honors figures from the cultural space who have distinguished themselves in promoting peace, diplomacy, and dialogue among peoples. (Rasoulof was sentenced in Iran to eight years in prison and public flogging for his films. Shortly before his arrest, he managed to flee his home country and currently resides in Germany.)

Rasoulof discussed how cinema can serve as a form of resistance and a beacon of hope, sharing his perspectives on freedom, culture, and the role of the artist in times of oppression. In 2024, I had the privilege of interviewing him about his film  The Seed of the Sacred Fig for this publication.

Two Documentaries Exploring Distinctive Approaches to Storytelling

Hair, Paper, Water…, a poetic and poignant documentary co-directed by Truong Minh Quy and Nicolas Graux, won the top prize: Pardo d’Oro – Concorso Cineasti del Presente. Shot over three years on a vintage Bolex camera, it is described as: She was born in a cave, more than 60 years ago. Now she lives in a village, with many children and grandchildren to look after. Sometimes, she dreams of her dead mother calling her home – to the cave. The film captures fleeting moments of her daily life and the transmission of her fragile language, Rục, to her grandchildren.

The film will have its North American premiere at the 2025 New York Film Festival this fall. Quy’s previous film, Việt and Nam, was at the 2024 New York Film Festival, which I wrote about for this publication.

Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation explores how the legacy of Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel On the Road reflects in today’s America. The film interweaves stories of modern-day “on-the-roaders” who share connections to Kerouac’s life, alongside those influenced by him or knew and loved him. Featured participants include Josh Brolin, W. Kamau Bell, Natalie Merchant, Matt Dillon, Jay McInerney and Joyce Johnson.

Director Ebs Burnough stated: When my producing partners, John Battsek and Eliza Hindmarch came to me three years ago with the idea of doing a film about Kerouac, I had reservations. I had previously directed The Capote Tapes, and I was not immediately drawn to telling the story of another male writer in America. But this film was different. It was never intended to be a Kerouac biopic; it was always a meditation on On the Road. As we developed the story, I became vested in telling the story of America through the book. As a black filmmaker who grew up in the States, and has spent a career in political campaigns as well as in government, traveling across the country myriad times, I was deeply aware of the different experiences people have while “on the road” and very aware that my relatives could not have taken the trip Kerouac did.