Ready to Create Locarno74!

They’re motivated, competent and knowledgeable. They’re the team – actually, teams – that will help Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro create the competitions, sections and program of Locarno74. It’s a team that was created via a blend of continuity and novelty, experience and youth, relationships and cohesion. There’s no shortage of familiar faces, from Mathilde Henrot to Stefan Ivančić to Daniela Persico. Then there are the new arrivals, both national and international, from Chile (Pamela Biénzobas) to Switzerland (Giovanni Marchini Camia). They will lend their expertise to the feature film selection; as for shorts, the four new members of the Pardi di domani committee are Eddie Bertozzi, Anne Gaschütz, Enrico Vannucci and Valeria Wagner. Alongside them we also have the team of advisors, to further broaden the Festival’s horizons: Jihan El Tahri, Manlio Gomarasca, KIM Young-woo, Olaf Möller, Tiny Mungwe e John Nein.

Giona A. Nazzaro, the new Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, commented: “Setting up a new team with the right skills, knowhow and motivation to work with the artistic director is a crucial step. This is a talented line-up of film industry professionals, whose expertise is internationally recognized. Together they represent a plurality of gazes that perfectly captures the idea of a Festival looking to the future. I am proud of this team, whose members are fully in line with both gender parity and the direction of our artistic research, and I am quite sure that our results will meet the high standards set by the tradition of the Locarno Film Festival.” 

The team, having taken advantage of early submissions (mid-November), is already at work, in compliance with current health measures, with the intention of putting together a complete edition of the Festival.

Three Teams, fifteen Profiles

Full-length selection
Pamela Biénzobas, a Chilean-French film consultant, critic and journalist who has long experience collaborating with film funds and industry events such as La Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde, Abycine Lanza, CineGouna Platform and the Doha Film Institute;

Mathilde Henrot from France, a programmer at the Sarajevo Film Festival, producer and co-founder of the Festival Scope Pro streaming platform, who has been on the Locarno Film Festival selection committee since 2019; director and producer

Stefan Ivančić, from Belgrade, Serbia, whose work has garnered numerous international awards and who served on the selection committee for the Pardi di domani shorts section at Locarno from 2017 to 2020;

Giovanni Marchini Camia, a film critic and programmer with dual Swiss and Italian nationality who writes for international titles including The Guardian and Film Comment and who is also director of the film culture magazine Fireflies. He has worked for the Locarno Film Festival since 2017 on projects such as the Locarno Talks la Mobiliare and Filmmakers Academy; Italian film critic and programmer

Daniela Persico, since 2013 a close collaborator with the Locarno Film Festival, where she has curated the film-and-literature event L’immagine e la parola and has served on the selection committee since 2019.

Short films selection
Eddie Bertozzi, the Italian film critic has a background in academic research on Chinese cinema, but is also active in film distribution and was Program Manager of the International Film Critics’ Week at the Venice Film Festival from 2009 to 2020. The other committee members are the German festival organizer and programmer

Anne Gaschütz, co-director of FILMFEST DRESDEN - International Short Film Festival and one of the initiators of Talking Shorts, an online platform devoted to short film criticism; 

Enrico Vannucci from Italy, an advisor on short films for the Venice Film Festival from 2014 to 2020 who was among the founders of both the Torino Short Film Market and Talking Shorts;

Valeria Wagner from Switzerland, a Zurich-based film producer and member of the programming office of Visions du Réel for its 2020 edition. 

Advisors
Eddie Bertozzi, consultant to the competition sections;

Jihan El Tahri, director, writer, visual artist and multiple award-winning producer, General Director of the Berlin-based documentary support institution DOX BOX. An expert in documentary filmmaking, she will be dealing with the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and Iran;

Manlio Gomarasca, founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine Nocturno Cinema, curator of major retrospectives for the Venice Film Festival and previously advisor to the selection committee at Locarno. He will be sharing his expertise on genre cinema; 

KIM Young-woo, a programmer in charge of Asian cinema for the Busan International Film Festival and one of the selection team for the Asian Project Market (APM). He will be focused on China, Korea and South-East Asia;

Olaf Möller, film critic, programmer and consultant to film archives and museums, who co-curated the Locarno Film Festival’s 2016 Retrospective on cinema in the young Federal Republic of Germany. He will be advising on Japan, India and Russia;

Tiny Mungwe, a documentary film and arts producer who was previously a programmer for the Durban International Film Festival and an associate curator for the Durban FilmMart program. She will be offering guidance on cinemas in Sub-Saharan Africa;

John Nein, Senior Programmer at the Sundance Film Festival since 2001 and curator of the Sundance Institute’s film preservation initiative, the Sundance Collection at UCLA, who was also the creator of the popular film culture conversation series Lost & Found at the Movies, and will be consultant for North America.