Now in its tenth edition, L’immagine e la parola looks back into the past and rediscovers it with new eyes. The spring-time event that weaves together film, literature and non-fiction writing will focus on the rapport between history and images. It’s a crucial topic for today and a source of inspiration for many writers and filmmakers, including Radu Jude, one of the most innovative European directors of recent years, whose work has investigated the revision and denial of the darker sides of his home country of Romania. Jude and his two most representative films to date will set the keynote for the program of screenings and discussions that unfolds across the weekend of the event.
On 11 March at 2 pm the GranRex theater will host the inaugural masterclass “Missing Images: On Festivals, Essay films and Untold Histories”, held by Kevin B. Lee, Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) supported by Swisscom. The masterclass will be in English with simultaneous translation in Italian. It will be followed at 3.30 pm by a presentation of three short films that adopt different strategies in the use of archival footage to reconfigure the historical narrative: A History of the World According to Getty Images (2022) by filmmaker and researcher Richard Misek, Potemkinitsii (The Potemkinists, 2022) by Radu Jude and Nazarbazi (نظربازی, 2022) by Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory. After the screenings, the three filmmakers will join a discussion moderated by Professor Lee. At 6 pm, again in the GranRex, there will be a discussion session on “Film Archives Between Conservation, Dissemination and Reinvention”: this debate on conservation practices for film heritage will be led by Gian Luca Farinelli, head of the Cineteca di Bologna, and Paola Malanga, artistic director of the Rome Film Fest, in conversation with the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, Giona A. Nazzaro. The evening will continue at 9 pm with a screening of the film for which Radu Jude won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2021: Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, 2021).
On Sunday 12 March, the day’s program will open at the GranRex at 10.30 am with a masterclass held jointly by director Radu Jude and editor Cătălin Cristuțiu. At 4 pm Jude will be joined by Carlo Ginzburg, author of the recent study Rapporti di forza. Storia, retorica, prova and one of the founders of Microhistory, for a discussion on archive footage and editing in history and cinema. The talk will be followed by a screening of Jude’s film Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari (I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, 2018), which returns to one the darkest moments of Romania’s past, the ethnic cleansing along the Eastern front in 1941.
As always, the weekend’s program will also include attractions for the family audience, with Locarno Kids la Mobiliare and the collaboration of Cinemagia: on Saturday 11 March from 2 pm at the PalaCinema in Locarno there will be the Locarno Kids Lab, a hands-on animation workshop for kids with Alessia Tamagni, while on Sunday 12 March at 10 am, again at the PalaCinema, there will be a screening of the brilliant gem of modern animation Princes et princesses (1999) by Michel Ocelot, a refined and atmospheric fable inspired by the technique of shadow puppetry. Ocelot’s own video introduction will be shown before the film.
Discover the complete program of events at L’immagine e la parola.
Admission to all screenings and events is free, but for masterclasses participants must register through the Festival’s website.
