With this year's Pardi di Domani, Locarno keeps insisting on something most of the circuit forgets: the short film is a form, not a waiting room.
Locarno has unveiled the Pardi di Domani selection for its 79th edition (5–15 August): forty world premieres across three competitions, drawn from twenty-nine countries. The number worth pausing on isn't forty. It's the quiet architecture underneath it — a section, the Concorso Corti d'Autore, reserved for short films by directors who are already established. Not débutants clearing their throats before a first feature. Working auteurs, choosing to make something that runs under an hour.
The short as an end, not a means
Most of the industry reads the short film as a business plan. It's the proof-of-concept, the calling card, the thing you screen to a financier so they'll trust you with the real budget. Under that logic the short is always pointing somewhere else — toward the feature that justifies it. Locarno's framing quietly refuses this. When you put Ben Rivers, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, or Antonin Peretjatko into a competition of their own, you're stating that a short by a serious filmmaker is not homework. It's the work.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. The feature-length film carries obligations the short can shrug off: a market, a runtime the exhibitors will accept, a story shaped to hold a paying room for two hours. The short answers to none of that. It can be an argument, a texture, a single idea followed until it breaks. It is the one length at which a director can still afford to be strange without a distributor flinching.
The feature has to survive the market. The short only has to be true. That freedom is exactly why the circuit should stop treating it as a rehearsal.
A festival that platforms the not-yet-arrived
This is consistent with what Locarno has always been for. Venice launches Oscar campaigns; Cannes crowns. Locarno's identity is stranger and more useful — it is the festival most comfortable betting on the unproven and the uncommercial, the place where a career often becomes visible before the wider world has agreed to look. Framing this year's selection around "the war of the worlds" — the public conflicts fracturing the present, and the private battles that define us — is of a piece with that. The short is where a filmmaker can take the temperature of a moment without waiting the three years a feature demands to reach a screen.
The circuit has spent a decade inflating the feature and shrinking everything around it into a marketing funnel. Locarno's wager is the opposite one: that a form can be small in minutes and large in ambition, and that an audience arriving in August deserves to be trusted with forty of them. If the short is a doorway, it is a doorway that leads back into the room you were already standing in — and asks you to see it again.