Mere days after the call for entries for the official image of Locarno76, the third after the ones won by Luciano Baragiola (2021) and Vito Manolo Roma (2022), the person responsible for that image for 15 years recounts what it means to craft it. It started with an invitation in 2006 and ended with the unreleased poster of 2020. His two favorites. “Designing the image of the Locarno Film Festival has gotten increasingly difficult”, concedes Michele Jannuzzi of the studio Jannuzzi & Smith, who now serves as a jury member assessing the projects that arrive from all over the world. “Ever since we decided to make it into a competition, we’ve been receiving hundreds of yellow and black leopards, because that is, after all, the Locarno Film Festival. But what we’re looking for, and waiting for, is the leopard that doesn’t exist yet.”
So, there’s no escaping the leopard, the yellow and the black?
«You can tweak it, but that’s it. In 2015 and 2016, we used UV technology to turn people into leopards. In that case, the animal itself was missing, but we still had the yellow, the black and the iconic spots. We moved away from the leopard, while still remaining in that area.»
No frustration in having to retain those three elements?
«At first, yes, there can be some frustration due to repetition, but when you’re in this line of work it then leads to curiosity in finding that little something no one has done before. Discovering a new dish, so to speak.»
How do you approach such a challenge?
«When you design the Locarno poster, you already know the answer, but you don’t have the image yet. By welcoming suggestions and visions from all over the world, it’s easier to find that ‘beyond’ we’re looking for. That something that makes you think ‘It’s still a leopard, but unlike any I’ve seen before.’ That’s what we got with Vito Manolo Roma last year: it was different, like a comic strip; we might never have done that, but it worked and matched the new vision for the Festival’s communication side. It wasn’t a plakativ poster, that keeps you transfixed, but something fluid, malleable, contagious. In the age of social media and multiple communication outlets, the poster is no longer the centerpiece, but part of the storytelling. Last year’s version did exactly that.»
How did your cooperation with the Festival begin?
«There was an invitation. At that time, the Festival was organizing events in embassies all around the world, throughout the year. We live and work here, and we were contacted to create the invitation for the Locarno event. I’d actually been thinking about a poster for quite some time, and that was the perfect opportunity to pitch it. So, instead of the conventional invitation card, I made a huge A2 sheet that could be folded into eight parts, an invitation and a poster at the same time. A few weeks later, at the event, Doris Longoni, who was the COO at the time, told me they wanted to work with us.»