The 79th edition returns Hong Sang-soo, Denis Côté and Basil Da Cunha to the main competition — and in a circuit addicted to the new name, that repetition is the boldest thing on the list.
Locarno unveiled the selection for its 79th edition (5–15 August) on 9 July, and the headline numbers do the usual festival work: 233 films from 69 countries, 103 of them world premieres. Artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro framed it as an adventurous programme that meets the pressures of the present without giving up the pleasure of a good story. All true, all expected. The more revealing detail is smaller and easy to skate past: the main International Competition is stacked with people Locarno has been screening for years.
The names it already knows
Hong Sang-soo is back with *Nowhere To Lay My Eyes*, another entry in a filmography so prolific that "another Hong" has become its own festival genre. Denis Côté arrives with *Nobody's Violence* — his seventeenth feature, at a festival that has hosted him again and again. Basil Da Cunha returns to the Lisbon margins with the gangland picture *O Jacaré*, territory he has mapped at Locarno before, and Gurvinder Singh rounds out a competition that reads, in places, like a reunion.
This runs against the grain of everything the circuit currently rewards. The prestige festivals compete on discovery: the debut that detonates, the world premiere no rival can claim, the fresh name to sell to distributors and the press. A returning auteur with a modest budget and no red-carpet wattage is, by that logic, the least exciting thing you can announce. Locarno announces it anyway, and puts it in the main competition.
Anyone can platform a new face once. Backing the same difficult directors across a decade — that is a curatorial position, not a press release.
The two festivals in one square
None of this makes Locarno austere. The same reveal gives the Piazza Grande its populist night air: an opening world premiere in Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's *The Green Eyes*, a star turn from Olivia Wilde, a restored classic under the open sky for eight thousand people. Locarno has always run two festivals at once — the lakeside crowd-pleaser and the unforgiving art-cinema competition — and the trick is that neither apologises for the other. The Piazza pays for the risk the Concorso takes.
What the 2026 list quietly asserts is that a festival's value isn't only in what it discovers but in what it keeps. Discovery is cheap; every festival on the calendar claims a find each August. Loyalty is expensive, because it means committing screen time and prize slots to directors whose work is demanding, unglamorous and commercially indifferent — and doing it not once but across careers. That is how a festival builds a canon instead of a news cycle, and how a filmmaker learns there is a room that will still be there for the seventeenth feature. In a circuit that treats every edition as a fresh audition, showing up for the same people is the genuinely adventurous move.