2024 Locarno Film Festival in Piazza Grande

By Eric Lavallée

It has to be among the best open-air public spaces at any festival to premiere a film and it also counts as a safe space for some world premiere screenings. Included in the Piazza Grande section, the folks that fill up the 8,000 seats will find a mix of world premieres, Swiss preems and so polished-off older films. Sundance preemed Gaucho Gaucho by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw will be nice to take in in the great outdoors and so will Tarsem Singh‘s The Fall (Restored Cut). On the world premieres side Simon Jaquemet‘s Electric Child in finally complete – filmed in October 2022 this is about a couple whose child develops an unusual illness. While the mother and baby drift into their own world, the computer-science professor father develops a pact with an A.I. character on a virtual island to save his child. In the high end items, Gianluca Jodice‘s Le Déluge (aka The Flood) stars Guillaume Canet and Mélanie Laurent, while César Díaz sees Bérénice Béjo in her native tongue in Mexico 86. Also in the Spanish language, we get a football drama in Rita by actress Paz Vega. Mohammad Rasoulof will receive another nice gift post-Cannes seeing his The Seed of the Sacred Fig play out the big screen. Here are all the selections:

Electric Child – Dir. Simon Jaquemet
Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, Philippines
World premiere

Gaucho Gaucho – Dir. Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw
USA, Argentina
Swiss premiere

Le Deluge – Dir. Gianluca Jodice
Italy, France
World premiere

Le Procès du Chien – Dir. Laetitia Dosch
Switzerland, France
Swiss premiere

Mexico 86 – Dir. César Díaz
Belgium, France
World premiere

Reinas – Dir. Klaudia Reynicke
Switzerland, Peru, Spain
Swiss premiere

Rita – Dir. Paz Vega
Spain
World premiere

Sauvages – Dir. Claude Barras
Switzerland, France, Belgium
Swiss premiere

Sew Torn – Dir. Freddy Macdonald
USA, Switzerland
International premiere

Shambhala – Dir. Min Bahadur Bham
Nepal, France, Norway, Turkey, Hong Kong, Taiwan, USA, Qatar
Swiss premiere

The Fall (Restored Cut) – Dir. Tarsem Singh
South Africa, India, United Kingdom
World premiere of the 4K restoration and director’s cut

The Piano – Dir. Jane Campion
Australia, New Zealand, France

The Seed of the Sacred Fig – Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof
Iran, Germany, France
Swiss premiere

Timestalker – Dir. Alice Lowe
United Kingdom
Swiss premiere

Une Femme Est Une Femme – Dir. Jean-Luc Godard
France, Italy
World premiere of the 4K restoration