27/02/2007

The Locarno International Film Festival (August 1-11) is this year celebrating its 60th anniversary.

The event is taking advantage of the occasion to give its visual communication a facelift and to open the Leopard competition to shorts.

An honorary Leopard will be awarded to Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, while the fifth Open Doors event will host films, directors and producers from the Middle East (Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria).

The second Swiss Cinema Day is scheduled to take place on August 7 and the festival will also pay tribute to various directors cited in the second volume (1966-2000) of the monumental "Histoire du cinéma suisse" by Hervé Dumont, director of the Cinémathèque suisse, and Maria Tortajada, history and cinema aesthetics lecturer at the University of Lausanne.

With 192,600 visitors, 3,200 film industry professionals and over 1,000 journalists, the 2006 Locarno Film Festival broke attendance records, while the quality of films selected in the first edition managed by artistic director Frédéric Maire was praised by the press both in Switzerland and abroad.

(Translated from French)