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Curtain Up on the Cannes Marche!Even though the Cannes Film Festival will not show the films they have selected, the Market marches on.Because the interconnectedness of audience, film industry, movie stars, press, cineastes and cinephiles and just plan gawking fans is so crucial to making the festival what it is, the Festival cannot take place, but the Cannes Marche was brave enough to take the bait and rise to the occasion with its Cannes Online.Visit for updates!

The conference schedule is packed and this first day has been exceptional.

Of the three conferences I attended, Meet the Streamers was the finest articulation of what is happening today which might point to a future that changes the personality of arthouse theater curation. Richard Lorber of Kino Lorber (USA), Olle Agebro of Draken Film (Sweden) and Jaume Ripoli of Filmin discussed the projects they launched to reply to the Covid 19 emergency,...

Mrs. Fang director Wang BingBelow you will find the awards for the 70th Locarno Festival, as well as an index of our coverage.AWARDSInternational CompetitionGolden Leopard: Mrs. Fang (Wang Bing) Special Jury Prize: Good Manners (Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra) Best Direction: F.J. Ossang (9 Doigts) Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert (Madame Hyde) Best Actor: Elliott Crosset Hove (Winter Brothers)Filmmakers of the Present Golden Leopard: ¾ (Ilian Metev) Special Jury Prize: Milla (Valerie Massadian) Prize for Best Emerging Director: Kim Dae-hwan (The First Lap) Special Mentions: Distant Constellation (Shevaun Mizrahi), Damned Summer (Pedro Cabeleira)Signs of Life Best Film: Cocote (Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias) Mantarraya Award: Phantasiesätze (Dane Komljen)First Feature Best First Feature: Scary Mother (Ana Urushadze)Art Peace Hotel Award: Meteors (Gürcan Keltek)Special Mention: Those Who Are Fine (Cyril Schäublin)Favorite MOMENTSFestival coverage by Daniel KasmanYacht Strafing, Gym Rivalry, Alcatraz Island: On Jacques Tourneur's Nick Carter, Master...

Days of Glory (1944)This year at the Locarno Festival I am looking for specific images, moments, techniques, qualities or scenes from films across the 70th edition's selection that grabbed me and have lingered past and beyond the next movie seen, whose characters, story and images have already begun to overwrite those that came just before.***“Like anything you will ever tell me,” dreamily says a Soviet dancer-turned partisan (Tamara Toumanova) to her lover and commander Vladmir (Gregory Peck in his first role), “it’s learned by heart.” Days of Glory (1944), a highly evocative masterpiece from Jacques Tourneur conjured in that brief moment during World War 2 when Hollywood was asked to make movies in support of our Soviet allies, with disjunctive, lyrical surrealness casts this dancer among the hardened Russian soldiers isolated in a crumbling, underground redoubt behind enemy lines. She comes from a world of art unknown to these fighters,...

Val Lewton’s third horror film, The Leopard Man (1943) initially seemed promising. Based on Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi, it had more pedigree than Lewton’s previous movies. He reunited his previous team: director Jacques Tourneur, writer Ardel Wray, even Dynamite, the black leopard from Cat People. Forced again to film on the Rko lot, he sent Wray to photograph Santa Fe, New Mexico and crafted meticulous sets around her snapshots. Despite this attention to detail, The Leopard Man is one of Lewton’s weakest efforts.

The plot is simple enough. Nightclub entertainers James (Dennis O’Keefe) and Kiki (Jean Brooks) arrive in Santa Fe with a leopard in tow; Kiki’s rival Clo-Clo (Margo) scares the cat, which escapes into the city. The leopard kills a Mexican girl, sending the city into a panic. Several other women die, but James grows convinced that the leopard isn’t behind them.

Even when based on actual events, classical Hollywood movies never strive for painstaking factual accuracy. This is best exemplified by the ever-present legal disclaimer “The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance to the name, character and history of any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental,” which appears not only in horror, sci-fi or musical extravaganzas, but also in biopics and historical reconstructions. In the latter two cases, the contradiction is only apparent. While using the above disclaimer (or variations thereof) to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits, the studios openly acknowledge what any person of common sense knows already: in the filmmaking business, dramatization and other poetic licenses are essential to tell and sell exciting stories to an audience, since reality is too boring and complex for an evening's entertainment. In other words, a commercial film is not a...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...