By handing its main competition to Fabrice Du Welz, a Belgian who works in dread and excess, Locarno is saying its art cinema has nothing to fear from a genre eye.
In the middle of July, a week or so before the 79th edition opens on 5 August, Locarno released the people who will decide its prizes. The list did the usual rounds — actresses, a producer, a former festival man come home — but the detail that matters sits at the top of it. The International Competition, the demanding heart of a festival built on difficult art cinema, will be presided over by Fabrice Du Welz, a Belgian director whose work lives in horror, dread and excess. That is not a neutral appointment. A jury president sets the temperature of a room, and Locarno has chosen someone who makes films the prestige circuit usually files under the wrong shelf.
A porous border, on purpose
The reflex reading is mismatch: the art-house festival, guardian of the slow and the severe, letting a genre man grade its most serious slate. But that reflex is exactly what the choice is built to correct. Du Welz is an auteur who happens to work in fear — his cinema is as controlled, as formally deliberate, as anything in a competition line-up, it simply aims its rigour at the nerves rather than the intellect. Putting him in the chair says the border between art cinema and genre is a shelving convention, not a fact about the films. Around him Locarno set a working jury rather than a photogenic one: the producer Marco Alessi, the actresses Lolita Chammah and Paulina García, and Olivier Père — once Locarno's own artistic director, now a distribution executive at ARTE France Cinéma, returning to judge the festival he used to programme.
Any festival can announce a bold line-up. Choosing who reads it — and trusting a genre eye to read the art cinema — is the quieter, braver call.
That last presence is its own small essay. A jury is one of the few things a festival publishes that is pure statement of taste, and taste is what a president shapes. A room that includes a genre director and a former programmer will weigh craft differently from a bench of famous faces — it will notice what a scene is engineered to do to you, and whether the film earns the effect or merely stages it. Locarno has spent years insisting that it discovers, that it stays loyal to the same difficult directors edition after edition. Naming Du Welz extends the same argument to the act of judging: that seriousness is a matter of how a film is made, not which genre it claims, and that the surest way to defend art cinema is to stop treating it as fragile. Before a single title screens on the Piazza, the festival has told us how it intends to look.