This year, as part of Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films, the Open Doors Screenings have doubled. The public interface of the Open Doors initiative, organized in partnership between the Locarno Film Festival and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA), the Open Doors Screenings offer a selection of films that best represent the tendencies and talents from the regions in focus. This customary mission of the Open Doors Screenings consists this year of the online selection of ten feature films and ten shorts coming from Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Like the rest of Locarno 2020’s virtual lineup, the films will be available for the duration of the Festival (August 5-15). As for on-site activities, the Open Doors Screenings take on an unusual form, called Through the Open Doors: a selection of ten feature films representing the past seventeen years of Open Doors activities and screenings. On the one hand, it’s titles that were part of previous editions of the Open Doors Screenings; on the other, it’s films that were successfully completed after being presented as projects in the Open Doors co-production network. Such is the case of the opening film of Through the Open Doors, Rubaiyat Hossain’s Made in Bangladesh. A powerful indictment of the working conditions for women in a textile factory in Dhaka, this story of unionized awareness with echoes of Norma Rae was meant to be the opening film of Geneva’s International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights, and was conceived by its brave creator through her Open Doors participation. In 2016, she took part in the Lab, aimed at emerging producers and filmmakers seeking international co-production, and in 2017 her Made in Bangladesh project was chosen for the Hub, finding support from various European producers and institutions. She returned again in 2018 as the producer of Sand City, the first feature project of the young director Mahde Hasan, whose short A Boring Film is part of this year’s Pardi di domani lineup, the first time for a short from Bangladesh.
Paolo Bertolin
