Emmanuel Carrère, the French author, screenwriter and director will be the focus of the Festival del film Locarno’s spring event’s third edition, L’immagine e la parola (19 – 22 March). The Festival has invited Carrère, a multi-faceted talent with a taste for formal experiment, to curate a program of screenings and encounters that will explore his creative world, and investigate relationships between film and the written word.
Emmanuel Carrère (born in Paris, 1957) began his career as a film critic for Positif and a publication which was a monographic study of Werner Herzog. His debut as a fiction author goes back to the 1980s with the novel The Jaguar’s Friend (1983). This was followed in 1986 by The Moustache, which he adapted for his second film as a director, La Moustache, screened in 2005 in the Quinzaine des réalisateurs in Cannes. He made his directorial debut in 2003 with Retour à Kotelnich, selected for the Venice Festival in the section Nuovi territori.
All of his books have been published throughout the world, and have been both critical and commercial successes: Class Trip (1995), The Adversary (2000), My Life as a Russian Novel (2007), Other Lives than Mine (2009) and Limonov (2011), which won the Renaudot Prize.
Throughout his career, Carrère has been able to span a wide range of writing and creative formats: from film criticism to literature, from documentary to fiction, from the big screen to TV. His output includes numerous scripts for films and TV series, including Les Revenants (2012) from which he went on to write his latest novel, Le Royaume (2014), about early Christianity. This book, which received Le Monde’s Book Award in September, will be published in Italian translation by Adelphi, available from the 26th of February.
Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director of the Festival del film Locarno, comments: “Over the course of his highly productive career – which is still evolving– Carrère has adopted a variety of styles and narrative approaches, sometimes borrowing techniques from film and literature. His tendency to simply bypass constraints and conventions and appeal directly to the reader/viewer makes him a good fit for Locarno: his books resemble film projects just waiting to be made, and, with their “documentary-like approach”, have a particular resonance in respect to the kind of films that Locarno often welcomes and helps launch. Hence this desire to invite him to Locarno to meet young filmmakers in a series of workshops. And then meeting him here gave me the desire to work with him on developing a different concept for the event, one that would be more organic in terms of the theme and the objectives it has set itself. The 2015 edition of L'immagine e parola is not simply devoted to, but also put together by, Carrère, who has curated the program as if it was a possible extension of is own creative universe.”
Mario Timbal, COO: “With this third edition, L’immagine e la parola confirms its role as a central pillar in the Festival del film Locarno’s range of cultural offerings during the year. A high level event with illustrious guests makes this a national and international landmark.”
As with previous editions, L’immagine e la parola is part of the Primavera Locarnese program, alongside the Eventi Letterari Monte Verità and Youtopia.
More detailed information on the program and its guests will be announced at the press conference in Locarno planned the 17 February. Specific partners for this event are Swisslife and Hertz.
Additional information on the workshops with Emmanuel Carrère are on www.pardo.ch
Press Office
68° Festival del film Locarno
5 – 15 | 8 | 2015
Via Ciseri 23 | CH-6601 Locarno
tel +41 91 756 21 21 | fax +41 91 756 21 49
press@pardo.ch | www.pardo.ch
