Locarno 2008

"Parque via": Mexican director Enrique Rivero's debut won the "Golden Leopard" and the FIPRESCI Prize.

The Film Festival of Locarno, founded in 1946, is the biggest and most important film event in Switzerland. Directors like Freddy Buache and David Streiff, Moritz de Hadeln, Marco Müller and Irene Bignardi guided it to its international reputation. Since 2006 the festival has been under the direction of Frédéric Maire, who after the 2009 edition will jump ship to the Swiss Cinematheque (Cinémathèque Suisse) in Lausanne. Since 2002 the festival which has described itself as "the smallest among the biggest" is officially tagged as an A-Festival. The heart of the ten days long event is the Piazza Grande which offers place to more than 8000 spectators and creates — if the weather is good — a magical atmosphere. The artistic weight lies on the international competition which is focused on young and new cinema; the winner (Parque via by Mexican director Enrique Rivero) gets the Golden Leopard. A second competition is installed for the "Cinéastes du présent" (contemporary filmmakers). Filmmakers like Ken Loach or Jim Jarmusch, Jafar Panahi or Fatih Akin began their international career here, close to the Lago Maggiore. Beside the discovery of new talents Locarno is known for all its rich and remarkable retrospectives, "Orson Welles" or "Film and Journalism", to name a few. In the last years important sections for the industry like "Open Doors" have been added to complete the program. More than a thousand journalists from all over the world cover the festival, and Locarno has established itself as an undeniable meeting place for the international and Swiss Film Industry. (Nicole Hess)

61st Film Festival Locarno, Switzerland, August 6-16, 2008, www.pardo.ch
The FIPRESCI Prize went to the Mexican film Parque via directed by Enrique Rivero, "for its outstanding story of an ordinary caracter, for its strong and independent dramaturgy and visual style, and for its critical view on a rigid fractured society between indigeneous and white people". Details

Reports
A Man Alone. Nicole Hess reviews Parque Vía. "Enrique Rivero has made a touching as well as stylistically independent movie that fits perfectly into the Mexican New Wave."
The Urban Jungle, and the Other Kind. Radovan Holub studies the relationship between a natural and a constructed world at Locarno. "The idea of nature as a kind of cinematic challenge appears in an increasing number of important Latin American films", he writes.
Creating Real Life, and Making Tt Look Easy. Emma Gray Munthe reviews 33 Scenes from Life: "The film is laugh-out-loud funny one moment, heartbreaking and completely devastating the next".
A New Take on a Classic Melodrama. Javier Porta Fouz reviews A Doomed Love. Director Mário Barroso manages, he writes, to "make a genre film with intelligence and wit" and to be "modern, and also passionate".
Going East. Mateusz Werner considers two films about the integration of Western and Eastern Europe: Emmanuel Finkiel's Nowhere Promised Land and Black Sea by Federico Bondi.

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