Locarno79 at the halfway mark: audiences up 1.6 per cent

The seventy-ninth edition of the Locarno Film Festival closed its first week with a 1.6 per cent rise in admissions compared with the same period last year. The figure covers the days up to Sunday and refers to the event's audience as a whole.

Director Raphaël Brunschwig said he was very satisfied with the trend, reading that percentage as confirmation of a consolidation under way rather than as a leap. He added that turnout remains excellent despite the high temperatures, which at a festival built around an open-air square are anything but a minor variable.

Among the guests, the first week was marked by Isabella Rossellini, who received the excellence award. The Italian actress said she was proud of a distinction that had already gone at Locarno to her father Roberto Rossellini and her brother Renzo, both directors. On Sunday evening the career Pardo went instead to the American director James Gray.

What played on the Piazza Grande

The evening programme held up. Among the titles that worked best were The Invite by Olivia Wilde and Armony by the Italian Dario Albertini, starring Valerio Mastandrea.

The longest applause went to Frank & Louis by the Swiss director Petra Volpe, her first film shot in English. It tells the story of an inmate who cares for an older cellmate with Alzheimer's, and grew out of a programme that really exists in a Californian prison. According to what emerged around the production, the work helped some of the prisoners involved in the project rediscover their humanity.

The figure released by the management covers only the first week and stops at Sunday, so it does not include the days on which the programme concentrates the competition screenings. The festival's second half will show whether the growth in audiences holds to the close, and with it whether the comparison with last year stays narrow or widens.

Organisationally, the heat remains the least controllable variable. An event that lives on open-air evening screenings depends on evening temperatures and on the audience's willingness to sit for two hours in the square, and no programming can act on that.