Locarno Invited the Stars, Then Put Discovery Back at the Center
Monica Bellucci is competing while Isabella Rossellini and James Gray draw crowds to the 79th Locarno Film Festival. The contrast reveals how a discovery festival can use celebrity without letting celebrity become the program.
by CinePixo5 min read41 views
A large nighttime audience raising white cards among yellow seats in Locarno's Piazza Grande · Kalai Ramu (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The 79th Locarno Film Festival opened on August 5 with the kind of guest list that can make a discovery festival look briefly like a red-carpet convention. Isabella Rossellini, Asia Argento and Virginie Efira were among the familiar names announced for tributes and public appearances. James Gray arrived for a career award and a presentation of Paper Tiger.
Monica Bellucci is the useful exception to that structure. She is not in Locarno only to receive an honor or revisit an established career. She stars in Giovanni Tortorici's Ketticè, one of the films competing for the Golden Leopard. Her celebrity therefore points into the competition rather than sitting above it.
That distinction matters. A festival can book recognizable faces for attention, but it earns its identity through the films to which that attention is redirected. Bellucci gives Ketticè an immediate public image. Locarno's job is to make the film, the filmmaker and the rest of the competition more interesting than the image by the time the lights come up.
A career award can become an interruption: a famous guest arrives, receives applause, supplies photographs and leaves the festival's actual program untouched. Locarno is more persuasive when the honor functions as a route through the work. Gray's Pardo alla Carriera accompanies
Paper Tiger
, his new film with Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, and a public conversation about the career that produced it.
The same principle gives the festival's invited stars a purpose beyond glamour. They bring different histories of screen acting and filmmaking into a program dominated by work that has no comparable reservoir of recognition. The encounter is unequal by design. A name people already know creates the crowd; the schedule decides what else that crowd may discover.
Locarno has spent decades building this tension into its personality. It can honor a filmmaker's past without behaving as though cinema's most important work has already happened. The award is useful when it becomes a lens, not a conclusion.
Piazza Grande turns recognition into traffic
Piazza Grande is the most visible expression of that bargain. Thousands of viewers gather in an open square before one of the largest outdoor screens in Europe. The setting turns a screening into civic spectacle, but it also makes the audience unusually mixed: accredited professionals, local residents, tourists and devoted cinephiles share the same temporary room.
Celebrity belongs naturally in that scale. A well-known actor or director can make the square feel like the center of the film world for an evening. Yet the architecture keeps refusing the private logic of a premiere. The audience is outside, the surrounding city remains visible, and a movie still has to hold a vast public after the ceremony ends.
That is why the crowd is not merely decoration in Locarno. It is part of the festival's editorial method. Recognition creates traffic, and traffic can be sent toward a restored film, a difficult new work or a filmmaker whose name has not yet become a headline.
The scale of the 2026 program makes that redirection concrete. Festival coverage reports 233 works and 103 world premieres across the selection. In the main competition, Bellucci's Ketticè sits beside films including Sarah Leonor's D'ici là, Ann Oren's Objet a and Basil da Cunha's O Jacaré. Gurvinder Singh's Rehmat, starring Naseeruddin Shah, is the only Indian film in this year's Golden Leopard race.
Those titles do not arrive with equal financing, distribution or press attention. They should not have to pretend that they do. A festival is valuable precisely because it can place unequal films inside the same field of serious consideration. The Golden Leopard does not erase the market; it creates a temporary space in which the market is not the only way to measure importance.
The competition also prevents the guest list from defining the edition too early. A familiar face may dominate the first photographs from Locarno. A film that few people had heard of on August 5 can become the work everyone carries out of the festival on August 15.
Do not write the winner before August 15
This edition is still in progress. The festival runs through August 15, so there is no honest reason to turn early reactions, star power or advance sales into a prediction of the Golden Leopard. Discovery requires leaving room for the program to change the conversation.
That patience is especially important online, where a festival is often flattened into arrivals, ovations and instant rankings. Those signals describe attention; they do not settle value. Locarno's more interesting story is unfolding between them: an audience moves from a person it recognizes toward films it does not, then decides what deserves to remain visible.
The stars are not a contradiction of that mission. Used well, they are its delivery system. Locarno can welcome Bellucci, Rossellini and Gray without allowing their fame to become the final hierarchy. The 79th edition will be defined not by who arrived with the largest audience, but by which films leave with one.
