Locarno79's five juries and the first competition for children

The 79th Locarno Film Festival, running from 5 to 15 August, is organised into eleven sections, three competitions and twenty awards. The programme includes 233 films chosen from 7,759 entries, with 103 world premieres. Giona A. Nazzaro is the artistic director.

This year's poster is by the American artist Cindy Sherman and shows a fictional character in stark black and white, wrapped in a yellow leopard-spotted headscarf.

Who hands out the awards

The international competition jury is chaired by the Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz. Its members are the Italian producer Marco Alessi, the French actress Lolita Chammah, the Chilean actress, director and playwright Paulina García, and Olivier Père, executive director of Arte France Cinéma and a former artistic director of the festival.

The Cineasti del presente competition is judged by the Tunisian director and producer Afef Ben Mahmoud, the Czech producer Radovan Síbrt and the Italian director Margherita Spampinato.

The Pardi di domani, devoted to short films, has a jury made up of the Lebanese director Mounia Akl, the Italian director Antonio Piazza and the South African producer Steven Markovitz. The section holds three separate competitions, international, Swiss national and author shorts, with more than thirty films selected.

The award for best first feature is in the hands of the Frenchman Matthieu Darras, who runs film labs and works as a programmer, the South Korean programmer Sung Moon of the Jeonju festival, and the Swiss-Peruvian director Klaudia Reynicke.

The Pardo for Change has a jury of a different cast: the Swiss journalist and writer Gianluca Grossi, the Somali-Austrian director Mo Harawe and the Swiss director Seta Thakur of the Wyss Academy for Nature.

The organisational novelty concerns Locarno Kids, which this year becomes a competitive section for the first time. Nine films are contesting the Locarno Kids Award la Mobiliare, decided by the vote of the youngest audience.

Piazza Grande lines up fourteen titles, and the out-of-competition selection holds as many again.

The structure says something about how the festival distributes authority. Alongside the professional juries sit the vote of the audience in the square and now that of the children, two mechanisms that take at least part of the verdicts out of the hands of the industry.