The more surprising turned out to be the announcement that the seated artistic director will be soon vacating the position to take over the responsibilities of Dieter Kosslick, the director of the Berlin International Film Festival, which he will be sharing with Mariette Rissenbeek as the new leadership team of Berlinale from onwards. The 71st edition of Locarno Film Festival thus became the swan song for the outgoing director.
The festival programming remained consistent with its current direction, echoing and mirroring similar dramaturgic patterns from the previous editions.
Besides some shared similarities between and edition, a cluster of films introduced in Locarno will be surely bowing in the Netherlands at the International Film Festival Rotterdam due to the shared aesthetic affinity and overlapping programming. However, the boom around exploring the combinatorics of fiction and documentary filmmaking and their seamless integration waned off and nothing as formally eccentric as Dragonfly Eyes by Xu Bing, a rare case of enforced narration carrying social commentary unto a series of authentic yet inconsistent found footage clips, made appearance.
The on-going debates about female representation and women in film industry defined the edition. Apart from several films named after their leading female protagonist and in one rare case anti-heroine, the 71st edition was the edition of women in pictures, literally and figuratively.
The festival did not shy away from being a political and this year, Locarno responded directly to the heated and on-going polemics on the gender inequality.
