Locarno to premiere The Sweeney, new films from Cohen, Kawase, Brisseau

The Locarno Film Festival has announced its line-up today, with 13 world premieres included in the 19-film international competition. The world premieres include Jean-Claude Brisseau’s The Girl From Nowhere from France, Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s The Shine Of Day from Austria, Swiss documentary Image Problem, Sho Miyake’s debut feature Japan, Jem Coehn’s project Museum Hours and Ilmar Raag’s Une Estonienne A Paris staring Jeanne Moreau.

The popular Piazza Grande selections will open with Nick Love’s The Sweeney [pictured] from the UK, and close with Markus Imhoof’s Swiss co-production documentary More Than Honey. Other selections for the huge open-air screenings (which regularly attract 8,000 viewers) include Pablo Larrain’s Cannes hit No, Steven Soderbergh’s stripper story Magic Mike, the world premiere of Quelques Heures De Printemps by Stéphane Brizé, Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, and Ruby Sparks, the new film from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, directors of Little Miss Sunshine (which famously started its success in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.)

The Cinema Of The Present selection includes 15 first or second films, mostly world premieres.

New section Histoire(s) du cinema will offer documentaries about film, restored classics and programmes devoted to festival honorees and guests. Those selections include new documentaries about Ben Gazzara and Otto Preminger.

The festival’s largest retrospective will be devoted to Otto Preminger, with tributes planned for — among others — Johnnie To, Leos Carax, Naomi Kawase, Arnon Milchan, Charlotte Rampling, Dino Risi, Hannes Schmidhauser, Ornella Muti, Sarah Morris, Renato Pozzetto and Ben Wheatley. Alain Delon will get a Lifetime Achievement Award and Harry Belafonte will also be recognised.

As previously reported, the festival’s various juries will be headed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, and Mark Peploe. The jury of the best first feature will be comprised of critics Dennis Lim and Boris Nelepo and programmer Abi Sakamoto.

Guests expected for Locarno’s 65th edition include Charlotte Rampling, Alain Delon, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Benoît Jacquot, Leos Carax, Claire Denis, Harry Belafonte, Eric Cantona and Rachida Brakni, Arnon Milchan, Johnnie To, Krzysztof Zanussi, Ray Winstone, Naomi Kawase, Bertrand Bonello, and Jia Zhang-ke.

In announcing the programme, artistic director Olivier Pere wrote: “Since its inception, the Locarno Festival has had a profi le as a bold and inquiring cinephile event, attentive to new aesthetic trends, geographical shifts, and rising young artists, often serving both as sleuth and pioneer. Film is constantly evolving, and today it is more fascinating than ever to observe these changes, assertions and journeys, from fi lm to digital, from fiction to documentary, from the personal to the collective, from the poetic to the political.Once again the Festival del film Locarno will prove, over its 65th edition, that it is the festival of film, all kinds of film and nothing but film, of the highlights of its history, its stars and artists to its most exciting future prospects with a constellation of new auteurs discovered every year in the various sections of the festival.”