Ebbs and flows. Emotions and thoughts. A continuous experience of values and messages, experienced through a careful eye on society's evolution and renewed through a highly personal and inclusive human touch. Cinema as a faithful and restless mirror of who we are, of our reality, of what we still know how to hope for. And a festival—Locarno, August, the Piazza Grande under the stars—as a place where all this finds form, breath, and community.
Your cultural identity is both Swiss and Italian. How does this duality inspire your work as director of an international festival like Locarno?
More than Swiss-Italian, I consider my cultural background strictly "cinephile." Because cinema remains the emotion that propels me into the world, and initiates a conscious escape to other places; it also allows me to experience reality in new ways and broaden my capacity for understanding and dialogue. Therefore, inevitably, I am Italian. Because it is in Italian that I speak, write, think, and interpret the future. However, I remain Swiss in the way I interact with the world: Switzerland taught me to be in one place without feeling confined, to focus my attention on what happens beyond its borders as if it were something that also concerns me. Consequently, even though I was born and raised in Switzerland, when I am in the Confederation I feel homesick for Italy. Likewise, when I am in Italy, I miss Switzerland. It's not restlessness: it's the condition of someone who has learned to live in distance without suffering it. In short, it's an "apprenticeship to distance," something very different from exile.
Let's return to your profession. In thirty years of work, you've encountered very different authors, cinematographies, and languages. What's the common denominator, the emotion, the gesture that still guides you as an artistic director today?
My work is inspired by curiosity, by visceral and impulsive emotions. My cultural choices aren't the result of choices, but rather generated by an immediate and therefore creative emotional juxtaposition. Only afterward comes thought, reflection, and the language that allows me to articulate my experiences. In this regard, I recall being influenced by films like "Rome, Open City" and Roberto Rossellini's "The Messiah." But also by the melodies of Ennio Morricone. He was a complete stranger to me. Until one evening, in my hometown of Dubendorf, I was watching "The Return of Ringo," a spaghetti western by Duccio Tessari, on RSI. From that moment, I realized that Morricone's music would accompany me for the rest of my life, and would also influence my professional career.
Among the hundreds of films you must watch every year, which narrative or stylistic elements seem capable of intercepting, expressing, or perhaps even anticipating cultural changes?
"It's perhaps the most challenging aspect of my job. I'm not looking for productions that capture change, but films that, in addition to appealing to my sensibilities, also and above all appeal to the audience, to prevent them from getting bored."
In today's fragmented geopolitical landscape, what role does an artistic event like the Locarno Festival play in giving voice to the collective conscience?
In a context like the one we unfortunately find ourselves experiencing, the role of a film festival is to be a receptive and inclusive platform for dialogue, distancing itself from any distortion of the essence of the issues surrounding us, and equally avoiding the presumption of interpreting them based on preconceptions. This means that, from a perspective of sharing the values that underpin our social experience—freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of opinion, democracy, freedom to meet, listen, mutual respect, independence from any preconceptions—well, starting from these founding elements of any civil society, a festival like Locarno becomes a place where people talk, where we listen to each other and perhaps even try to theorize solutions. I admit: it's a very challenging goal if we consider that, from a political standpoint, our society is now moving towards extreme polarization. It is from this perspective that a reference to the core values of our social conscience becomes the added value of the productions I select and propose.
At the end of a day of meetings, events, and screenings, when Piazza Grande empties, what is the feeling that more than any other confirms the meaning of your work?
Beyond the issues that inevitably need to be resolved, I experience two sensations. First, a feeling of profound gratitude for being able to work in a context that puts me at the service of a community. At the same time, I experience responsibility and the awareness that it is a privilege I must not abuse. These are the values that inspire my life, my work, and my conscience. My days begin by looking up at the sky: the enormous, immortal, and eternal screen onto which humanity has always projected its desires, ambitions, fears, and hopes, and where the results of its actions are inevitably reflected. It is in these moments that I pray to be up to the task I find myself undertaking, the commitment that will be required to achieve it. And I find myself a spectator among spectators of that infinite spectacle of an art that represents life.
