necessities Pere


With his contract extended until at least 2014, Locarno’s artistic director Olivier Pere talks to Martin Blaney about festival innovations, global trends and blending fiction with reality


as artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival. “This year, we received a lot of interesting features from North America coming from a new generation of fi lm- makers who are producing some really exciting work,” says Pere, who has forged closer links with up-and-coming US and Asian fi lm-makers as a result of his travels. “We had begun looking more closely at North America two years ago and had shown The Color Wheel by Alex Ross Perry, among others,” says Pere, who has chosen a string of US titles to represent the US independent scene including Joel Potrykus’ debut feature Ape (screen- ing in the festival’s discovery section, Concorso Cineasti), Sean Baker’s Starlet (in competition) and Leslye Headland’s debut feature Bachelorette (Piazza Grande). Also, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who launched Little Miss Sunshine at Locarno in 2006, will return with Ruby Sparks.


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“The same goes for Japan,” Pere con- tinues. “We had invited some impres- sive works last year, and during my visit to Tokyo this year I saw remarkable new fi lms from very young directors as well as by established names.”


Japanese fi lms selected include Sho Miyake’s Playback, which will compete for the Golden Leopard, as well as Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s Inori, which plays in Concorso Cin- easti.


However, the attention given to US and Asian fi lms does not mean Pere is neglecting Euro- pean cinema. “We have strong connections as a festival with fi lm-making in Europe and the programming of European titles


n 10 Screen International August 2012


livier Pere has spent the last 12 months travelling the globe in the build-up to his third edition


Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris bring Ruby Sparks (pictured) to Locarno


‘I hope my contract extension can be seen as proof they like what


I’ve been doing!’ Olivier Pere, Locarno Film Festival


will still be very diverse,” he stresses. Still, when it comes to the festival’s selection, Pere admits that despite the high standard of international films, some territories will be less represented than last year. “Nothing really disappointed me in the various national cinematographies this year. It’s always a question of the quantity and quality of production. For instance, we will have fewer French fi lms in competition this year, while the Swiss presence will more or less stay at the same level,” says Pere, who points to the signifi cance of screening local fare. “I think it’s important to have Swiss fi lms represented in all of the festival’s sections.”


When it comes to identify- ing trends in contempo- rary film-making from his trawl of the global cinematic output of the past 12 months, Pere sees “a ten- dency for more low- budget


features Playback


which are very free and fl exible to be able


to deal with reality”, as well as a ten- dency towards politically themed projects. “The political dimension of the fi lms


has also become very important — we already saw that in many fi lms last year and this trend has continued in 2012. You can see a new generation of fi lm- makers working in various countries who have a similar state of mind as well as production methods in common.” As with last year when Swiss film-


maker Fernand Melgar’s Special Flight (Vol Spécial) was selected to screen in the International Competition, Pere has again chosen a documentary — Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s Leviathan — to compete against 18 fi c- tion feature fi lms for the festival’s pres- tigious Golden Leopard prize. “We don’t make any distinctions


between fiction and documentary any more because the fi lms are dealing with reality in a different kind of way,” says Pere, who explains that a documentary selected for the main competition should be “more of an essay and a poetic inter- pretation of life than the traditional form of documentary one sees on television”.


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