Giona A. Nazzaro unveiled the Locarno Film Festival lineup on Thursday, and the number alone told the story: more than 200 titles, with almost half set to be world premieres. It is a broad, premiere-heavy slate built to push the festival back toward the kind of surprise that makes a program feel alive.
That is why searches for Monica Bellucci have brushed up against Locarno this week, even though her name is not part of the program itself. The festival is once again being sold on discovery, and Nazzaro said the guiding idea is "curated diversity," a phrase meant to cover a lineup that stretches from established filmmakers to newer voices without settling into a predictable pattern.
The scale matters because it is not just large, it is unusually open-ended. Among the titles named so far are new works by Hong Sangsoo, Gurvinder Singh, Denis Côté, Florin Șerban and Isabelle Stever, while Giovanni Tortorici's sophomore feature Ketticè comes with Luca Guadagnino as producer. That mix tells you what Locarno wants the lineup to look like: a place where reputation, risk and first exposure sit in the same frame.
The opening-night slot goes to The Green Eyes by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, a film about a refugee child whose father leaves the family home to escape deportation and who then falls into a deep sleep. Nazzaro described it as a blend of social-issue material and fantasy elements, and said the festival wants it to reach a large audience. That makes the opener a kind of statement of purpose for the whole selection, not just a single screening.
What is missing, though, is the full map. The lineup is framed as unpredictable and diverse, but only a limited set of names and titles has been singled out from a program that runs past 200 films. That leaves the real test of Nazzaro's pitch in the details not yet on display: whether the rest of the competition can match the promise of breadth that the announcement itself puts front and center.
For now, the answer is simpler. Locarno has chosen volume, range and novelty as its calling card, and it has done so with a lineup that is already larger than many festival programs and heavy enough in premieres to suggest that the next phase will be about discovery, not explanation.
