Growing up passionate about film, Giona A Nazzaro’s broad tastes embraced George A Romero and early John Woo as well as Pasolini, Fassbinder and Bergman. As director of Locarno Film Festival, he has found his people, he tells Screen.
Locarno Film Festival artistic director Giona A Nazzaro tells a revealing story about how he first watched Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. He was growing up in a town near Zurich. His father, an engineer, disapproved of his young son going to the cinema and certainly did not want him watching a shark thriller.
“He considered that film to be the beginning of the end of western civilisation,” Nazzaro remembers. The 10-year-old saved up for the ticket with money he had “skimmed off” when grocery shopping for his mother. However, on the day he planned to make the trip, his father took the family swimming.
“I played along [but] as soon as everybody else from the family was in the swimming pool, I hit the locker room, dressed and got away. My family couldn’t find me because I was sitting in the cinema, frozen with terror because people these days don’t remember how scary Jaws was. Everybody was clinging to their seats. When the film was finally over, I felt I had been on the wildest ride of my young life. But somehow the worst was yet to come — I had to face the wrath of my dad because I had escaped his authority to watch this piece of trash.”
Screen champion
As a critic and programmer, Nazzaro is known for his eclectic tastes. He is a champion of genre movies and comedies as well as auteur-driven arthouse. Growing up, his tastes broadened and he would devour Pasolini, Buñuel, Bergman and Fassbinder as well as Star Wars. “For me, having grown up as a Catholic kid, watching something like [Buñuel’s] The Milky Way where someone dreams the pope is being shot by anarchistic revolutionaries during the civil war in Spain, it felt like blasphemy, the most outrageous thing I had ever seen.”
The young film enthusiast had an album in which he kept the tickets of the films he watched. He would write notes about his responses (“Charles Bronson was quite scary”). Nazzaro loved literature as much as cinema. He studied German and English literature at Italy’s Università di Napoli L’Orientale and briefly considered a career as an academic. His high-minded student friends could not understand his passion for George A Romero’s Day Of The Dead or David Cronenberg’s body horror. Meanwhile, his movie-loving friends had no interest in Thomas Mann or Franz Kafka. Nazzaro felt caught between two worlds.
One of his first professional film assignments was working for an association of Italian cine-clubs. He volunteered to sell subscriptions at Venice Film Festival. “They would pay my accreditation and a room. I was using the morning to sell subscriptions and I would have the afternoon free.”
Nazzaro also started “writing for cheap tabloids in order to make a living”. He soon became a fully fledged film critic, working for Italian magazine Filmcritica among others. He still contributes articles today (one of his most recent reviews — “very positive” — was of Ti West’s Pearl). His move into film programming happened “by pure chance”. After leaving Switzerland, Nazzaro was living in Mondragone, a small town in south Italy that had two poorly programmed cinemas. He began to advise on what films should be screened; not every choice worked. “Fata Morgana scared away at least half the audience for good,” he remembers of Werner Herzog’s 1979 movie. Nonetheless, he successfully showed a wide range of films.
Thanks to a friend who was moving house and gave him “tons of VHS tapes”, Nazzaro made his first discovery of John Woo (“a kindred spirit”) and Hong Kong cinema — subjects on which he has published books and is an acknowledged expert. “I realised we westerners were late to the party,” he notes of how Europeans and Americans discovered Hong Kong filmmaking in the 1990s, when “1997 was already looming” and the industry there was about to come under the heel of the mainland Chinese authorities. “What felt like a discovery was already the end,” he says.
Music is another of Nazzaro’s passions and he has been collecting vinyl records throughout his adult life. “I never sold them. I kept buying them… space is a real issue.” His latest purchases includes a live LP by Captain Beefheart and new records from Sparks and Water From Your Eyes. “When my day comes to a close, I sit in front of my turntable. I listen to two or three records in a row,” Nazzaro says.
His knowledge of pre-revolution psychedelic rock in Iran helped land Ali Ahmadzadeh’s Iran-Germany co-production Critical Zone for this year’s festival. The Iranian producer was impressed Nazzaro knew the music of Kourosh Yaghmaei, an Iranian singer-songwriter from the 1970s. “I am very curious,” he says. “That has always driven me.”
Admiring glances
Nazzaro is now in his third year as artistic director at Locarno and is delighted to be at a festival he has always admired. “The cool people went to Locarno. I wanted to be part of that club,” he says of what lured him here. He had worked previously for International Film Festival Rotterdam, Nyon’s Visions du Réel and Venice’s Critics’ Week.
It has not been an easy three years. Nazzaro and the team have had to deal with Covid (“in a way, it felt like beginning from scratch”) and then the 75th anniversary edition. This year will mark the last for Marco Solari in the role of festival president. Whatever the challenges, Nazzaro relishes the job.
“Ultimately, we all work to a goal, which is to wait for that moment when the lights dim and all eyes are on the screen on the Piazza Grande. Then you can feel the audience hold its breath. That’s the moment that makes it all worthwhile.”
Spotlight: Locarno line-up
“The programme has been welcomed with warmth and curiosity,” artistic director Giona A Nazzaro says of this year’s typically eclectic line-up.
The splashy Piazza Grande screenings include The Falling Star (L’Etoile Filant) from Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, the duo behind Lost In Paris. “It’s a surrealistic comedy that has this quirky Kaurismäki-y, Buster Keaton-y, Jacques Tati-esque touch.”
The special guests include Tsai Ming- liang and UK director Ken Loach, attending with what is likely his last film, The Old Oak. Meanwhile, experienced producer Marianne Slot receives the prestigious Raimondo Rezzonico Award. Cate Blanchett, executive producer of Noora Niasari’s Shayda, is still in talks to attend but her participation is in doubt due the SAG-AFTRA strike (see below).
In International Competition, Estonia’s Rainer Sarnet (whom Nazzaro calls “maybe one of the best-kept secrets in the film industry”) is unveiling kung-fu comedy The Invisible Fight.
The International Competition also includes Ukrainian director Maryna Vroda’s debut Stepne, a winter tale about a man who comes back from the city to tend his dying mother.
Israeli director Dani Rosenberg’s The Vanishing Soldier (a world premiere in International Competition) is about an Israeli soldier who absconds from Gaza and is mistakenly thought to have been kidnapped. Meanwhile, International Competition also includes Bosnian Dutch director Ena Sendijarevic’s Sweet Dreams, the follow‑up to Take Me Somewhere Nice. The new film is a period piece set on a remote Indonesian island with a sugar plantation.
Romanian director Radu Jude will be in town with the “highly political, extremely fun” Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World.
Filipino director Lav Diaz is presenting Essential Truths Of The Lake, about the consequences of the anti-drugs war waged by the autocratic former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte.
The selection includes lighter fare, such as Quentin Dupieux’s Yannick (“simply hilarious”, says Nazzaro) and US indie Lousy Carter from director Bob Byington. In Cineasti del Presente, for first and second features, is “crazy, erotic, on-the-road comedy” On The Go, directed by Julia de Castro and Maria Royo.
“If you come to a festival, you don’t have to be serious or gloomy all the time,” says Nazzaro, with a smile.
No comments yet