As its 79th edition opens with a promise to free the spectator from predictive viewing, Locarno stages the exact contradiction the rest of the circuit would rather not name.
Locarno's 79th edition opened on 5 August in front of the Piazza Grande and runs to the 15th, and this year its artistic director Giona Nazzaro has handed the festival something firmer than a lineup: a thesis. The programme — 233 films from 69 countries, 103 of them world premieres, opening on Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's *The Green Eyes*, the pair's first feature since *Gagarine* — is being sold less as a slate than as an argument about how we watch. Nazzaro's stated ambition is to return cinema to something a recommendation engine cannot predict, to let an audience be surprised in an age built to abolish surprise. It is a good line. It is also, this week, a slightly awkward one.
The Piazza and the boardroom
Because a few hundred metres from that rhetoric, Locarno Pro is convening more than a thousand professionals under the blunt banner *Power. People. Data.* Its StepIn think-tank opens by asking how algorithms, platform economics and AI are reshaping independent film; its new investment scheme is walking some forty-five private financiers through the same halls. So the festival is running two messages at once. On the Piazza: cinema as an interruption, a freedom from consumer habit. In the market: a sober reckoning with the machinery that has made habit the industry's operating logic. This is not hypocrisy — it is honesty of a rare kind. Most festivals stage the romance and outsource the anxiety. Locarno has put both on the programme and let them argue in public.
A festival that can only promise unpredictability is making the boldest claim on the circuit — that the surprise itself, not any single title, is the thing worth travelling for.
What Nazzaro is really doing is repositioning what a discovery festival sells. The algorithm's threat to cinema was never bad taste; it is the slow death of the unchosen encounter — the film you would never have queried, served by a room rather than a feed. Locarno's identity has always rested on that encounter, on catching a filmmaker before anyone told you to care. Naming the algorithm as the adversary turns that old function into a stance. It also raises the stakes on the festival itself. You cannot brand your way to unpredictability; you have to programme it, and then let a jury and a Piazza crowd of eight thousand actually be surprised. The moment the "adventurous" lineup starts to feel curated for a known appetite — festival-friendly rigour, the safe kind of difficult — the thesis collapses into marketing.
For now the bet is live, and it is the right one for this festival to make. Locarno is small enough to still mean it and old enough to know the cost. Whether the films earn the claim is the only review that matters, and it will be written over the next ten days, one unpredicted screening at a time.