Locarno 2024 Lineup

By the Stream stars Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, and Cho Young in the story of a lecturer who asks her uncle, a blacklisted actor, to direct a skit at her university. Hong’s thirty-second feature is one of seventeen films selected to premiere in the International Competition. Among the most-anticipated is The Sparrow in the Chimney, directed by Ramon Zürcher and produced by his twin brother, Silvan. In the third feature from the team behind The Strange Little Cat (2013) and The Girl and the Spider (2021), Maren Eggert plays a wife and mother who hosts her sister and her family in their childhood home in the country. Sparks fly.

Other highlights in the Competition lineup include Christoph Hochhäusler’s Death Will Come, starring Sophie Verbeeck as a killer hired by a notorious gangster (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) to even a score; Ben Rivers’s Bogancloch, a portrait of a loner that blends documentary and fiction; Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times), the second film in a trilogy examining the lives of young workers in China; Pia Marais’s Transamazonia, in which a missionary’s daughter survives a plane crash in the jungle and becomes known as a miracle healer; and Mond, the second feature from Kurdwin Ayub, who won the Best First Feature Award in Berlin for Sonne (2022).

On Wednesday, Locarno announced a full lineup of 225 films for its seventy-seventh edition. The festival’s most spectacular venue is the Piazza Grande, which is turned into an open-air theater seating eight thousand attendees. Opening night, August 7, will see the presentation of Excellence Awards to Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet and the premiere of Gianluca Jodice’s The Flood, starring Laurent and Canet as Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI. The Piazza Grande program will also feature Tarsem’s restored cut of The Fall (2006) and new restorations of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman (1961), and Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993).

The Filmmakers of the Present competition will spotlight first and second features, including Invention from Courtney Stephens, who codirected The American Sector (2020) with Pacho Velez. The Pardi di Domani section will showcase formally innovative work, including new short films from Denis Côté and Kevin Jerome Everson. Established filmmakers premiering work out of competition include Radu Jude, Isild Le Besco, Bertrand Mandico, and Fabrice Du Welz, whose The Passion According to Béatrice will feature appearances from Abel Ferrara and Béatrice Dalle as themselves.

Along with the major retrospective, The Lady with the Torch: The Centenary of Columbia Pictures, which we took a quick first look at a few days ago, the Histoire(s) du Cinéma program will present new restorations, films about films, cinematic essays and remixes, and an homage to Stan Brakhage. King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), one of the greatest silent films ever made, will screen with live accompaniment from the Orchestra della Svizzera italiana. Locarno will also salute its 2024 award winners with revival screenings: Jane Campion (An Angel at My Table), Irène Jacob (Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red), Shah Rukh Khan (Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas), and producer Stacey Sher (Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained). Locarno 2024 will run through August 17.