Maggie Morgan found this year's round of the Locarno Film Festival (2-12 August) as inclusive as it was welcoming Let me start by what it is not -- the Locarno Film Festival is not Cannes. There are no red carpets and grand entries and no photographers vying for the attention of stars. Stars are not the highlight of the event. (Actors and actresses -- many of them famous -- do attend the festival, but manage to blend into the crowd and not create commotion.) Unlike Cannes, festival screenings are open to the public. Going to the Piazza Grande, the vast square in the middle of Locarno, is the highlight of the day for festival participants and local cinema-goers. It is a tradition, dating back to the early years of the festival, to have daily open-air screenings in a space that seats 7,000 people before a giant screen, after which they can vote for the winner of the Public Choice Award. This year the prize went to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives of Others). The film takes place in East Germany in the 1980s where a surveillance official wholeheartedly working for STASI, the state police service, is assigned to spy on a well known playwright. He does his work faithfully, hoping to advance his career, without anticipating that literature, art and music -- an integral part of the playwright's life -- will change his life. Every night from 2 to 12 August, a camera showed a bird's eye view of the crowded piazza. At 9.30pm it moved to the clock tower in the square to show that it was time to start. First-time artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival Frederic Maire would then appear on stage to introduce the director of the film about to be screened. Though this year was the 59th round of the Locarno Film Festival, Maire, along with other organisers, seemed keen to highlight the identity of the event -- the fact that since its start Locarno has been a forum for premiere oeuvres and not just international premieres of films. Whatever is new or experimental finds space at the festival. Some people say the films that premiere in Locarno are the ones that were not accepted in Cannes or Venice. Michael Bertrami, award-winning Swiss documentary and feature filmmaker, was on the festival programming board this year. Previously in charge of the selection process for the Leopards of Tomorrow Short Film Competition, he says "the festival takes pride in being the springboard for many new directors, trends and styles. It has been interesting to watch young directors come in with their short films and later come back again to premiere full-length feature films." The Promised Land, Bertrami's first long feature, was premiered in Locarno in 2004. To cite some examples closer to home, Yousri Nasrallah's Al-Medina (The City, 1999), Ossama Fawzi's first film Afareet Al-Asphalt (Asphalt Devils, 1996) and Nacer Khemir's Tawq Al-Hamama Al-Mafqud (The Lost Ring of the Dove, 1991) all premiered in Locarno, winning the Jury Prize in their respective years. It was with a sense of pride that Maire mentioned that one- third of the films in the international competition were first features. Das Fraulein, the directorial debut of Swiss/Croatian director Andrea Staka, was given the Golden Leopard, the festival's most prestigious award. The film shows the lives of three women from former Yugoslavia who immigrated to Switzerland, raising issues of identity, language, culture and homeland. " Das Fraulein," says Staka, "is a personal film that connects my two worlds. I grew up in Switzerland even though former Yugoslavia is my family's country... The film shows the lives of three modern women from different regions of a country that no longer exists... I wanted to explore displacement in our era; more and more people are moving between cultures, be they refugees, travellers or simply homeless." American Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson, also a first work, won the Special Jury Prize, while Portuguese director Hugo Vieira da Silva received a special mention from the jury for his quasi-experimental first film, Body Rice. Many films occupied themselves with issues of cultural and social interaction. Other than Das Fraulein, the German film Der Mann Von Der Botschaft (The Man From the Embassy) dealt with a German man on diplomatic mission to Georgia and his relationship with a young Georgian girl. Their friendship develops within the context of the German embassy's foreign aid mission to Georgia. In Le Dernier Des Fous (The Last Madman), a French/Belgian film that received special mention from the Ecumenical Jury for being both "vivid and visionary and for its denouncement of a world where there is an absence of hope and love," there is another significant cross-cultural encounter. Malika, the Moroccan housekeeper of a highly dysfunctional family, is its balancing force and the one character to whom family members resort to find acceptance and comfort, while Suzanne, a French film directed by Vivianne Candas, portrays the relationship between a French man and a Greek woman. The fact that people who occupy the same geographical space can be different -- culturally, socially and religiously -- was a recurrent motif in this year's films. Many characters were bilingual, there were silences that interrupted stuttered efforts at communication, and heavy accents struggled to make themselves understood in the language of another. Whether or not it is significant, it is certainly worth noting that in comparison most of the films at Cannes were much more focused, "local" and culturally specific in their subject matter. Nanni Moretti's Il Caimano (The Crocodile) occupied itself with Italian characters and life and the film-scene and politics of that country, while Pedro Almodovar's Volver (Return) had a brilliant cast of exclusively Spanish women. While such films have an undeniably lofty content and universal appeal, it is striking that the films of the younger film directors screened at Locarno were more earthy, edgy and matter-of-fact when it came to portraying the daily realities of globalisation. The Locarno Film Festival does not shy away from risks -- either stylistically or thematically. The Play Forward section features video art and installations, while the Filmmakers of the Present competition was created as a "space for discoveries and event films... navigating among the unexpected and increasingly blurred frontiers between fiction and reality". Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man) directed by Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salheb, was screened in this section of the festival. The film is a modern vampire story that mixes reality with magical realism and takes place in contemporary Beirut. Plunging deep into current events, the Leopards of Tomorrow Short Film Section featured films from the East of the Mediterranean. Chicca Bergonzi, the director of the section, says that "in light of the tragic events that have plunged the Middle East back into the drama of war, the films chosen symbolically represent an unbearable current situation: stories full of humanity, anger, despair, tenderness, and desires often told without any filter or mediation, from which we can and we must draw the courage to demand a different future". Among the films in competition were Aftershave directed by Lebanese Hany Tamba, the Palestinian filmmaker Sameh Zoabi's Be Quiet, which was also shown in Cannes in 2005 and which won the prize for best short fiction at the Biennale of Arab Cinema in Paris this year. Ca Sera Beau -- From Beirut With Love, directed by Wael Noureddine, also shown as part of the Biennale of Arab Cinema in Paris this year, was likewise screened in Locarno, and the Jordanian films Quelques Miettes Pour Les Oiseaux and Sharar were in competition. Najwa Najjar's Yasmine Tughanni (Yasmine Sings) received special mention for its unique portrayal of "the violence and accusations faced by the Palestinian population". Marco Cameroni worked alongside the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs in programming the festival section The Open Doors. This year the focus was on Asian cinema. "The work of certain cinematographers is foregrounded and because they are here they are able to meet other producers, distributors and filmmakers so that they can do more work and bigger projects. We hope that these same filmmakers will come next year with their films for the official competition," said Camroni. Next year Open Doors will feature Middle Eastern cinema. Cameroni explained that "Locarno is a place for serious artists... People with social and political awareness come here, people who are politically engaged." This year's festival took place while the Israeli army continued its attacks on Lebanon. A few weeks before it opened, the festival administration decided to cut off one of its sponsors, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, removing logos and any mention from printed materials. Several Arab films were dispersed in the various sections of the festival but few directors were present. Rachid Bouchreb's Indigenes was shown to a large audience at the Piazza Grande. Youssef Chahine's Bab Al-Hadid was shown as part of a retrospective, while Jocelyn Saab's Dunya; Kiss Me In My Eyes, was shown in the film market section. The film, which stars Hanan Turk and Mohamed Mounir, is soon to receive a European release. The atmosphere at the Locarno Film Festival is inclusive and welcoming. Sitting in the Piazza Grande to watch films makes it seem that the sky is the limit. There were no rainy nights or cloudy skies to spoil the charm of the Piazza Grande in this round of the festival, and every night you could see the stars.
