Giona A. Nazzaro will serve as Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival for an extra three years following a contract extension announced this afternoon by the Swiss festival.
Nazzaro, a popular critic, film historian, and former head of the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week, has been Locarno’s chief since 2021. Under the extension, he will stay with the festival until 2028.
“I would like to thank President Maja Hoffmann and the entire Board of Directors of the Locarno Film Festival for the trust and esteem placed in me and in the team that I have the privilege of leading,” Nazzaro said in a statement.
“To pursue together the work of these first five years, in a moment full of unheard-of transformations in the audiovisual sector and film industry – at a complex historical moment – is an exciting challenge that will inspire us confidently towards our 80th anniversary.”
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The festival’s 2025 edition runs August 6-16. Last year, the festival’s top prize was picked up by Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė with her debut feature, Toxic.
Directed by Bliuvaitė from a screenplay she also wrote, the film follows two 13-year-olds, Marija and Kristina, who form a unique bond at a local modeling school, where the promise of a better life pushes girls to violate their bodies in increasingly extreme ways.
The festival’s 2025 rep programme will focus on British postwar cinema. Locarno has teamed with the BFI National Archive, Cinémathèque suisse, and Studiocanal on the retrospective, curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
The program will span the work of well-known British filmmakers like David Lean, Carol Reed, and Powell and Pressburger to lesser-known directors like Seth Holt and Lance Comfort. Women filmmakers working on British shores like Muriel Box, Wendy Toye, Margaret Tait, and Jill Craigie as well as American filmmakers exiled to the UK by the anti-Communist blacklist like Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, and Edward Dmytryk will also feature.
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