Locarno Meets

This week on #LocarnoMeets , we sat down with Alexander Payne, the comedic genius behind some of the best films of the past three decades, including “The Holdovers”, “Election”, and “Sideways”. He joined us to discuss his career, working with George Clooney on “The Descendants”, and his low, low budgets.

Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji’s latest film (“Irkalla: Gilgamesh's Dream”), which premiered on the Piazza Grande during Locarno78, was hailed as a major achievement, both in terms of its artistry and the circumstances of its production. He joined us to discuss the myth of Gilgamesh, shooting a movie in Baghdad, and being shot at in Baghdad.

When, in August 2025, we had the honour of awarding the Raimondo Rezzonico Award to the Lebanese independent company Abbout Productions – founded by Georges Schoucair and Myriam Sassine – we could never have imagined that, just a few months later, we would find ourselves facing the current dramatic international situation and that war would be raging harsher than ever in Lebanon. At the time, in L...

Serving as head of the Locarno78 jury last year, Rithy Panh is a legend of Cambodian cinema. Over his thirty year career, he has tirelessly interrogated the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge with creativity and originality. He joined us on the latest episode of #LocarnoMeets to talk about movies, TikTok, and the demagogues of the tech world.

Vicky Krieps is one of the definitive European actors of her generation. But her new film, the astonishing “Yakushima's Illusion”, which world premiered at Locarno78, dropped her deep into an ancient forest on the eponymous Japanese island, the mystical place that once served as, among other things, the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki's “Princess Mononoke”. We talked about preparing for a role as a...

Best known for “21 Bridges” and his work on television shows like “Game of Thrones”, director Brian Kirk’s much anticipated new film is the icy thriller “The Dead of Winter” starring Emma Thompson in a bravura role as a steely Minnesotan widow named Barb. As the film premiered to acclaim on the Piazza Grande at Locarno78, we sat down with Kirk to dig into the mechanics of shooting in snow and coll...

Nadia Tereszkiewicz is the actor at the heart of “Heads of Tails?” an award-winning new spaghetti western by Italian filmmaking duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. This magnetic actress joined us on the latest episode of LocarnoMeets to talk about “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, John C. Reilly, corsets, and horses.

The Swiss director, cinematographer, and close collaborator on some of Jean-Luc Godard’s final works Fabrice Aragno made his debut as a feature filmmaker at Locarno78 with the hypnotic “Le Lac”, a near-wordless experimental romantic drama that takes place during a sailing competition on Lake Geneva. Aragno joined us on Locarno Meets to discuss his work to capture the spirit of the lake itself, why...

Colm Meaney is the definitive Irish character actor of his generation, having starred in classics like “The Commitments”, “The Damned United”, and “Layer Cake” over a near 50-year career. Meanwhile, his roles in Hollywood blockbusters like “Die Hard 2”, “Con Air”, and “The Last of the Mohicans”, as well as on TV in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, have cemented hi...

From ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Blue Velvet’ to Disney Channel originals, nobody has had a career like Duwayne Dunham’s. In the latest episode of Locarno Meets, the singular editor and director reflects on cutting some of the most iconic films of our time, explores longstanding collaborations with George Lucas and David Lynch – from ‘Twin Peaks’ to ‘Wild at Heart’ – and dives into his “Western capitalist fa...

A comedian from New York who knows what’s wrong with the movie industry, Maysoon Zayid spent Locarno78 haranguing cinema executives about the kind of work being produced, and she joined us on Locarno Meets to do the same. “The idea that diversity only applies to diverse audiences is a supremacist mindset” says the Palestinian-American comic, a disability rights advocate uncompromising in her criti...

We start the new year off with another episode of our movie podcast Locarno Meets, this time in conversation with the iconic star LucyLiu and Eric Lin, director of her celebrated film “Rosemead”. Winner of the Prix du Public UBS – the audience award – at Locarno78, “Rosemead” tells the heart-wrenching, real-life story of a woman, played by Liu, who discovers her teenage son is obsessed with violen...

Ed Guiney is an Irish producer known for his collaborations with filmmakers like Yorgos Lanthimos and Joana Hogg. We invited him to join us on Locarno Meets to give his insights on the state of indie filmmaking in Europe, his artistic partnership with Yorgos Lanthimos, Letterboxd’s influence on arthouse attendance, and his definition of the role of producer.

Over the course of a more than 45-year career, Willem Dafoe has played everything, from the Green Goblin in “Spider-Man” to Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”. But crucially, he has never rested on his laurels, and continues to collaborate on ever more bold and daring projects with a new generation of emerging filmmakers. In Locarno to present Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s...

Our guest this week on Locarno Meets is Bill Condon, the man behind some of the biggest movie musicals of the modern age, from “Chicago” to “Dreamgirls” to “Beauty and the Beast”. He joined us to talk timeliness, down and dirty prison dramas, working with Jennifer Lopez’s tight schedule, and how it all combined in his latest film “Kiss of the Spider Woman”, which was the closing film of Locarno78.

An eye-popping, heart-pounding genre film that premiered at Locarno78, “I Live Here Now” is a very funny, very scary, and very weird debut movie from Julie Pacino. This week on LocarnoMeets, the director joins us to talk about pink paint, David Lynch, and being traumatized on the set of “The Devil’s Advocate”.

This week on Locarno Meets we're joined by the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, who – in a remarkable and emotional in-depth discussion – talks about leaving Iran, the retribution she faced for debuting in Hollywood with “Body of Lies”, the Women, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegī, Āzādī) movement, making the extraordinary and disturbing “Alpha” with Julia Ducournau, and finally the joy – and ph...

Joining us this week on Locarno Meets is Eskil Vogt, the Norwegian screenwriter and filmmaker best known for his collaborations with Joachim Trier that include the celebrated “Oslo, August 31st”, “The Worst Person in the World”, and this year’s “Sentimental Value”. We chatted with Vogt about that ongoing creative partnership, the difficulties and revelations of working in middle age, and working w...

Our video podcast Locarno Meets is back for its third season, and for the first episode we sat down with Emma Thompson to talk about her new thriller “Dead of Winter”, which is now released in the UK following its world premiere at Locarno78, as well as her theory of adapting Jane Austen, her origins in sketch comedy, and bundling her Best Screenplay Oscar through airport security. Locarno Meets:...

For our final episode for season two of Locarno Meets, we were delighted to be joined by actress Caroline Goodall, whose illustrious career has seen her turn in remarkable performances in now-classic films by many of the greatest names in contemporary cinema. Goodall was in Locarno to promote her latest film, the Piazza Grande-playing “Sew Torn”, directed by the prodigious young director Freddy Ma...

Close your eyes for a moment and think of the sound a lightsaber makes. Think of the sound of Darth Vader breathing. Think of E.T. saying he wants to phone home. All those sound effects are the work of legendary sound designer Ben Burtt. At the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, Burtt was in town to collect the Vision Award Ticinomoda, given to celebrate his exceptional career as a sound artist in Hollyw...

Producers don’t always get their day in the spotlight. At the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, the Raimondo Rezzonico Award was given to legendary indie producer Stacey Sher, who is responsible for a genuinely eye-popping line-up of iconic movies. Just to name a few: “Pulp Fiction”, “Erin Brockovich”, “Reality Bites”, “Out of Sight”, “Mathilda”, “Mrs. America”, “Contagion”, “Man on the Moon”, “Gattaca”...

This week on Locarno Meets, we caught up with Italian star Luca Marinelli, best known to international audiences for his roles in “M”, “The Eight Mountains”, and “Martin Eden”. Marinelli was in Locarno to serve on the main jury at the 77ᵗʰ edition of the Festival alongside some of the leading lights of auteur cinema. We took the opportunity to sit down with the charismatic and thoughtful actor to...

An exemplary character actor with a distinctive face: that’s how Tim Blake Nelson is perhaps most often described. Yet beyond memorable roles in films by Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers, and Terrence Malick, Nelson is also an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, responsible for a handful of impressive works in a variety of genres. This week, Nelson joins us on Locarno Meets while serving a...

Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner has one of the most immediately recognizable signatures as an auteur. Her films are known as much for their formal austerity as for their daring subject matter; they are films that – to use her phrase – “do not shout so loudly”. Those are also the kinds of films that Hausner, as Jury President at the 77ᵗʰ Locarno Film Festival, did not want to overlook in favor o...