The festival already has a patron: what a different one would change

Peter Thiel is not in Locarno, has never been announced there and has no connection to the festival. This article closes a series of hypotheses and takes up the question the others left open: what happens to a cultural institution when it depends on private wealth.

The question is not abstract, because at Locarno the answer already exists. The presidency has been held since 2023 by Maja Hoffmann, heir to the Roche pharmaceutical fortune and a recognised patron of contemporary art.

The record of those years can be checked. Her arrival strengthened the event's international profile without launching a rebrand. The artistic direction stayed with Giona A. Nazzaro, who describes his approach as continuity, with sections and side events largely unchanged. The most visible alteration, dropping the experimental section "Moving Ahead", coincided with opening the main competition to bolder work.

Private money is not the problem

The festival does not depend on a single source in any case. The 36 Swiss titles in the programme rest on public grants, on the public broadcaster and on foundations. The exhibition at the Casa Rusca museum is supported by the canton's Swisslos Fund, by the Ernst Göhner Stiftung and by the Fondazione cultura nel Locarnese.

What distinguishes one patron from another is therefore not where the money came from. It is the conditions attached to it.

The Thiel Fellowship, for instance, is not neutral funding: the 100,000-dollar grant is conditional on leaving university. The money is there to produce a specific behaviour, and this is stated openly.

Applied to a festival, conditional support of that kind would have immediate effects. There would be no need to impose one film or forbid another, because it would be enough to tie the contribution to an indicator, such as the presence of recognisable guests or the number of spectators in the square.

The substantive difference lies in who decides what counts as success. As long as that definition stays with the artistic direction, the selection can include a Palestinian film, a Georgian one and a Brazilian debut without having to justify their return.

That is the real stake in the relationship between private wealth and culture, rather than the size of the cheque. An institution that agrees to be measured by someone else's criteria stops being the place where things are discovered before anyone else, and becomes the place where what someone already knows gets confirmed.