The line-up for the 70th Locarno Festival promises a range of excting home-grown films amongst some big hitters and some hidden gems.

Electric Sheep will be at the Locarno Film Festival for the first time this year, and with its 16 title-strong Piazza Grande features and 11 world premieres, the 70th edition of the festival promises to be intriguing, fun and hugely exciting.

Opening tonight with Tomorrow and Every Other Day directed by Noemie Lvovsky, the Locarno competition line-up usually focuses on content rather than big names and this year is no exception. We are particularly looking forward to the new film by John Carroll Lynch, Lucky, starring Hary Dean Stanton and David Lynch, and other promising works by exciting new and established filmmakers such as Aaron Katz ( Gemini) and Jim McKay (En el Séptimo Día), Swiss director Dominik Locher ( Goliath, Quebec –based Denis Côté (A Skin So Soft), French auteur Serge Bozon ( Madame Hyde, starring Isabelle Huppert), Romanian director Andrei Cretulescu (Charlston) and Travis Wilkerson, whose latest work Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun concerns a crime that has haunted his personal life since his childhood.

The Piazza Grande films in this 70th anniversary edition include Atomic Blonde with Charlize Theron, Cannes festival hit Good Time starring Robert Pattinson, Kumail Nanjiani’s refreshingly unusual romantic comedy The Big Sick, What Happened to Monday? with Glenn Close, Willem Dafoe and Noomi rapace, and the world premiere of Anup Singh’s The Song of Scorpions, starring Irrfan Khan, who will be one of the festival’s special guests this year.

Actor and director Mathieu Kassovitz, who stars in Samuel Jouy’s debut feature Sparring, will receive the festival’s 2017 excellence award, while Nastassja Kinski will be honoured with a lifetime achievement award and Adrien Brody will receive the honorary 2017 Leopard Club award.

The festival’s retrospective is dedicated to B-movie legend Jacques Tourneur (1904 – 1977), whose 1943 classic I Walked With A Zombie also plays in the Piazza Grande section.

Check out the line-up below, along with our reviews where available.

PIAZZA GRANDE
Stories of Love That Cannot Belong to This World, Francesca Comencini, Italy
Atomic Blonde, David Leitch, U.S.
Chien, Samuel Benchetrit, France
Tomorrow and Thereafter, Noemie Lvovsky, France
Three Peaks, Jan Zabeil, Germany, Italy
Good Time, Josh and Ben Safdie, U.S.
Gotthard – One Life, One Soul, Kevin Merz, Italy
I Walked With a Zombie, Jacques Tourneur, U.S.
Iceman, Feliz Randau, Germany, Italy, Austria
Let The Corpses Tan, Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, Belgium, France
Lola Pater, Nadir Mokneche, France
Sicilia!, Jean-Marie Straub, Italy, France, Germany
Sparring, Samuel Jouy, France
The Big Sick, Michael Showalter, U.S.
The Song of Scorpions, Anup Singh, Switzerland, France
What Happened to Monday, Tommy Wirkola, U.K.

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
9 Doigts, F.J. Ossang, France, Portugal
Good Manners, Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra, Brazil
Charleston, Andrei Cretulescu, France, Romania
Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun, Travis Wilkerson, U.S.
Freedom, Jan Speckenbach, Germany
Gemini, Aaron Katz, U.S.
Gli Asteroidi, Germano Maccioni, Italy
Goliath, Dominik Locher, Switzerland
Good Luck, Ben Russell, France, Germania
La Telenovela Errante, Raul Ruiz, Chile
Lucky, John Carroll Lynch, U.S.
Madame Hyde, Serge Bozon, France
Mrs. Fang, Wang Bing, China, Germany
Dragonfly Eyes, Xu Bing, Cina
A Skin So Soft, Denis Cote, Canada
Winter Brothers, Hlynur Palmason, Denmark, Iceland
Wajib, Annemarie Jacir, Palestine, France
En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day), Jim McKay, U.S.

For more Information about this year’s programme visit the Locarno website.

Pamela Jahn