The Piazza Grande, Locarno’s unique open-air auditorium with seating capacity for 7,500, state-of-the-art projection and perfect sound.

SPOT ON

Marco Müller, the multi-lingual, multi-cultural director of the Locarno Film Festival, is not the sort of man from whom you expect soundbites. On the other hand, Müller has become extremely adept (and, perhaps more to the point, successful) at promoting the event to people who might not normally have given a Swiss film festival a second glance. Those who have particularly come to appreciate the event include studio marketing chiefs, who have recognised it as a valuable platform for their late-summer films; filmmakers who take advantage of Locarno’s relaxed, mid-summer atmosphere to exchange ideas away from the pressures of Cannes or Venice (veteran US director Joe Dante described it “as the most filmmaker-friendly festival in the world”); journalists who want to get a sense of what is really new in world cinema (they have, says Müller, “understood that they will discover the names that in, five, six, seven years, will become the major draws”); and even young people looking to combine a lakeside holiday with some solid cinemagoing (the early-August dates of the Festival are the only ones for which the surrounding campsites are fully booked).

Festival director Marco Müller, who describes the event as “a blend between Cannes and Telluride”.

So it is not altogether surprising that Müller has managed to sum up Locarno in one small, pithy phrase. “We are really a blend between Cannes and Telluride,” he says, carefully situating Locarno between the excesses of its big southern neighbour and the intimate, niche-like atmosphere of the little neighbourhood festival held in the Colorado Rockies a few weeks later. Locarno will celebrate its 53rd outing (three less than Venice; the same number as Cannes; three more than Berlin) from August 2-12 this year. If last year is anything to go by, around 180,000 people will turn up for what, against all the statistics, remains a surprisingly intimate event. A lot of this has to do with the setting: the Festival is held in a beautiful small town on the shores of Lake Maggiore, with the Alps rising majestically behind. Locarno is in the heart of the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland (the nearest international airport is, in fact, in Milan, some 70 miles to the south in Italy), and is thus ideally poised between northern and southern Europe, between the French-and-German-speaking world and the Mediterranean countries.