Eight thousand people voting and the truth few people share

Peter Thiel is not announced in Locarno. This article compares two ways of establishing whether something has value: one used by the festival, the other described in a book about venture capital.

In Piazza Grande the audience acts as jury. Thousands of spectators vote for the Prix du Public UBS, worth 30,000 francs. On the opening night of the 79th edition eight thousand people sat in front of the screen.

Thiel's criterion runs the other way. In conversations with founders he puts a question he made famous in the book "Zero to One", written with Blake Masters: what important truth do very few people agree with you on. In his reasoning, an idea everyone agrees with is already priced in and yields no advantage.

The festival uses both systems

The opposition is less sharp than it looks, because at Locarno the two mechanisms coexist.

The international competition is not decided by the audience. Seventeen films are selected by a small group of programmers and judged by five people, chaired by the Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz. The same applies to Cineasti del presente, to the Pardi di domani and to the best first feature award, all entrusted to juries of three or five members.

The collective vote intervenes at only two points: Piazza Grande and, from this year, the Locarno Kids section, where nine films are judged by the youngest audience.

The division is coherent. On films aimed at a wide audience, the audience decides. On work nobody knows, a small group decides and takes responsibility for it.

It is exactly the structure Thiel describes for investment, applied in reverse. In venture capital the small group bets against common opinion and then waits for the market to prove it right. At a festival the small group selects against common opinion and then hands the result to a square that is free to ignore it.

The difference lies in what happens when the bet does not pay. A fund that is wrong loses money. A festival that is wrong loses credibility, and credibility is the only thing that lets it, the following year, seat eight thousand people in front of a film they know nothing about.