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LOCARNO 2019

The 72nd Locarno Film Festival announces its opening and closing titles

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- The first edition of the festival under Lili Hinstin’s directorship will open with Ginevra Elkann’s debut, Magari, and will close with Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth

The 72nd Locarno Film Festival announces its opening and closing titles
Magari by Ginevra Elkann

The Locarno International Film Festival is getting ready for its 72nd edition, the first to unspool with Lili Hinstin as the new artistic director. The first titles have been announced for the leading Swiss festival, which this year runs from 7-17 August – more precisely, the opening- and closing-night films, which will both be screened in the Piazza Grande in front of 8,000 viewers.

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The Locarno Film Festival will open on Wednesday 7 August with the world premiere of Magari [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
, the debut feature by Italian director-producer Ginevra Elkann, who will be at the opening ceremony accompanied by her leading actors, Italian stars Alba Rohrwacher and Riccardo Scamarcio. The film portrays the upbringing of three children after their parents’ divorce in Italy in the early 1980s (see the news). The cast of the Franco-Italian co-production also includes Céline Sallette, Brett Gelman, Milo Roussel, Ettore Giustiniani, Oro De Commarque and Benjamin Baroche. Elkann’s first directorial effort was the short film Vado a Messa, which was screened in 2005 at the 62nd Venice Film Festival, and since then, she has been heavily involved in film production, including working on recent titles such as Land [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
by Babak Jalali, Chlorine [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sara Serraiocco
film profile
]
by Lamberto Sanfelice and White Shadow [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Noaz Deshe
film profile
]
by Noaz Deshe.

The 72nd Locarno Film Festival will wrap on Saturday 17 August with the awards ceremony, again in the Piazza Grande, which will be followed by the international premiere of To the Ends of the Earth, the latest work by acclaimed Japanese master director-screenwriter-author Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The film tells the story of Yoko, played by former J-pop singer Atsuko Maeda, who has already collaborated with Kurosawa on other projects. She plays a travel-show hostess who follows the ancient Silk Road with her team, with their ultimate aim being to capture a legendary fish. In the movie, which was shot in Uzbekistan, everything is seen in a dreamlike and burlesque way. The cast includes Ryo Kase, Shôta Sometani, Adiz Radjabovand and Tokio Emoto. Kurosawa’s last visit to Locarno was in 2013, when his feature Real participated in the International Competition.

Lili Hinstin, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, commented on the selection: “From the promising debut of a young European filmmaker with roots in France, Italy and the UK to the latest work from the most important Japanese director working today, the Locarno Film Festival maps out its overarching mission from the opening to the closing night: to discover the talents of tomorrow and to follow established masters as they take on new and unexpected challenges.”

Magari and To the Ends of the Earth are the first two titles to be announced in the Piazza Grande sidebar and are eligible for the Audience Award, which is worth CHF 30,000. The complete line-up of the 72nd Locarno Film Festival will be announced on 17 July.

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