Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner will serve as jury president at the upcoming Locarno Film Festival, running August 7-17.
Hausner and her jury will hand out the festival’s top honor – the Golden Leopard.
Born in Vienna in 1972, Hausner has a history at the Swiss Festival. She picked up the main prize in Locarno’s Pardi di Domani section for the short Flora in 1997. Following Flora, she screened Inter-View, her 45-minute graduation film, at Cannes in 1999. She has gone on to screen several feature films in competition at Cannes, including Lovely Rita (2001) and Hotel (2004).
Hausner’s other credits include Lourdes (2009), Amour Fou (2014), her English-language debut Little Joe (2019), and last year’s Club Zero (2023).
“It is a great honor and also a great pleasure for me to preside over the main jury of this year’s Locarno Film Festival”, said Hausner.
“The responsibility I feel is to respectfully hear the various opinions of my fellow jury members, as I truly believe that every person sees a different film and that every perspective is interesting to discuss. For me, Locarno is a festival that values artistic and original approaches in filmmaking and thus reinforces the avant-garde of world cinema. I am happy to contribute to this agenda because filmmaking is, in my opinion, about challenging our perspectives and finding new and unusual ways to look at things”.
Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno Artistic Director added: “A vital and restless filmmaker, Jessica Hausner has created a diverse body of work reflecting the most hidden aspects of contemporary society with extraordinary depth. With clarity, steadfastness, and impeccable progression, she has imagined both spiritual and fantastical worlds that reflect the cogent richness of a complex and contradictory human experience. To have Jessica Hausner as jury president of the Locarno Film Festival’s Concorso Internazionale is an extraordinary honor and a guarantee that the films will be discussed by a jury led by one of the most extraordinary filmmakers working today”.
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