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Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a series of correspondence pieces written by the participants in the Critics Academy.Illustrations by Lucy Jones.In our second missive from the Locarno Critics Academy, Leonard Krähmer, Lucía Requejo, and Katarina Docalovich put the filmmakers of the present in conversation with retrospective selections—particularly the films presented in “The Lady with the Torch,” the festival’s 2024 Retrospective surveying the history of Columbia Pictures, curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.The Crowd.Dear Kat and Lucía,Prioritizing the retrospective at a major festival like Locarno—which claims to be a haven for exciting new voices, where the Cineasti del Presente are put in the spotlight, and where cinema is questioned about its futures and dead ends—could be misconstrued as a relapse into nostalgia. There may be some truth to this, but short-circuiting the new and the old can cause a productive tension, perhaps...