[Column] Locarno International Film Festival hits several snags

By Derek Elley, contributing writer to Cine21

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Frederic Maire’s first, snafu-ridden stint as head of the Locarno International Film Festival, held August 2-12, showed that you need more than a nice personality and a film buff’s grasp of cinema to make a successful festival nowadays. You also need top-level contacts in the industry, a manic drive to make your own festival the very best - and bags of stamina.

Maire, 44, has worked for Locarno in various capacities for the past 20 years. He says he was surprised when he was approached last summer to take over from Italian cultural journalist Irene Bigardi as program director, though being Swiss, he fit the profile of who the local government wanted in the job after 14 years of Italians running the show.

Politically, then, Maire was good news. And his initial ideas about tightening the festival’s structure (by abolishing the video competition, for example, and several of Bigardi’s literary-salon-style additions) and bringing some glitz back to the evening screenings in the Piazza Grande, the lakeside town’s main square, sounded eminently sensible.

But at this year’s festival, the only thing that didn’t foul things up was the weather. Not one film was rained off the Piazza Grande - a miracle, as the weather, usually very hot and humid, is prone to change at a moment’s notice in the Swiss Alps.

That was the good news; the bad news began on the first night. Apart from Maire and festival president Marco Solari, no one was in the Piazza to represent the opening night’s film, "Miami Vice," and certainly not director Michael Mann, who sent a tiny video message instead, even though he was just across the border in Italy at the time.

As for the lineup, this year’s Locarno was not significantly improved in terms of the number of films. There was no giant thematic retrospective as in previous years, simply a tribute to Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, plus 10 of his own favorite films - which proved a surprisingly conventional lineup for such a maverick director.

One of Maire’s main jurors, French actress Emmanuelle Devos, had already pulled out for "personal reasons;" a week later, another juror, Austrian director Barbara Albert, resigned when a local paper revealed she had done some script work on one of the competing films. Meanwhile, the press were griping about changes to the press conference and screening schedules; Solari was giving interviews saying he did not have enough money to celebrate the festival’s 60th anniversary next year in fitting style; the Swiss newspapers were dubbing the festival’s two competitions major disappointments, and Maire was starting to lose his voice.