Cineasti del presente, the section where Locarno looks for new names

The 79th Locarno Film Festival, running from 5 to 15 August, has selected 233 films from 69 countries. There are 103 world premieres, chosen from a record 7,759 entries.

Cineasti del presente is the section reserved for first and second features, and it is where the festival places its bets on directors who are not yet widely known.

Beatrice Gibson presents her first feature, "At Night", set in a twilit Paris where women move between dream, fiction and reality.

Ana Vaz brings "Fire Flower", which treats cinema as a means of altering human perception and restoring a link with non-human life.

Mohanad Yaqubi directs "Revolutionaries Never Die", which handles film as political testimony and intimate memory at once.

Sun Xun presents "Magic Atlas", a woodcut-animated film worked on for a decade, which takes a magician into the sealed coal empire of Luocha.

The main competition

In the international competition the South Korean Hong Sangsoo presents "Nowhere to Lay My Eyes", with Kim Minhee, the story of siblings who meet their mother again on the island of Jeju after ten years apart.

The Canadian Denis Côté directs "Nobody's Violence", following a solitary woman employed by a mysterious organisation working in assisted dying.

Ann Oren presents "Objet A", on control and desire, through two visionary surgeons: one steals objects, the other wants to become one.

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña bring "Donkey Princess", a stop-motion animation in which a princess crosses different worlds after her father banishes her lover. Nelson Yeo, for his part, reworks the myth of Chang'e and Hou Yi as wuxia science fiction in "The House on the Moon".

Gurvinder Singh weaves three stories of present-day Punjab in "Rehmat", with Naseeruddin Shah in the cast. In "Hearing", Lê Bảo follows a mechanic installing decibel meters while struggling with the silences in his own family. Isabelle Stever sets a queer Ukrainian couple's relationship and one partner's transition against the Russian invasion in "I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming".

Out of competition, Albert Serra presents "Seize Moments of My Life" with Ingrid Caven, while Edgar Pêra brings "Asphalt Guerrilla", about a quiet student's path into a terrorist organisation.

The parallel section includes "Bloody Tennis" by Nikias Chryssos, "Sundown" by Rebekah McKendry and "Roma Elastica" by Bertrand Mandico, set at Cinecittà in 1982.