The 79th Locarno Film Festival will world premiere new films from Hong Sangsoo, Denis Côté, and Albert Serra, with artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro calling the 2026 lineup "adventurous" in an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter (The Hollywood Reporter).

Hong Sangsoo, a former Golden Leopard winner — that is the festival's top prize — returns to the Swiss lakeside with Nowhere to Lay My Eyes. Denis Côté brings Nobody's Violence, and Albert Serra presents Sixteen Moments of My Life. The three filmmakers anchor a selection that includes 103 world premieres across the festival's sections (Variety).

Locarno's curators have never shied from putting restorations and classics alongside the new work, and this edition follows that pattern. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and David Lynch's Wild at Heart will both screen. A 4K restoration of Kevin Costner's extended director's cut of Dances With Wolves rounds out the retrospective programming — a format that lets audiences see the longer version of the 1990 epic as its director intended, on a big screen with renewed picture quality (The Hollywood Reporter).

The festival's main retrospective looks to a darker chapter of Hollywood history. Titled "Red & Black – Hollywood Left and the Blacklist," it examines the era when studio workers were barred from employment over suspected communist sympathies, with films connected to figures including John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, and Richard Wright (Locarno Film Festival).

Honours go to a wide-ranging group this year. Directors James Gray and Darren Aronofsky will each receive festival tributes. Actress Virginie Efira takes the Leopard Club Award. Isabella Rossellini receives a festival honour, and Asia Argento will collect a life achievement award. Rick Baker, the seven-time Oscar-winning makeup artist behind creatures from An American Werewolf in London to Men in Black, receives the Vision Award (The Hollywood Reporter).

Nazzaro, whose contract as artistic director runs through the 80th edition in 2027 (Locarno Film Festival), referenced ongoing global conflicts in his remarks about the programme — a signal that the festival is programming with awareness of the world beyond the Piazza Grande, the open-air venue that seats 8,000 viewers each night (Screen Daily).

The industry side is active too. The Open Doors initiative, which supports filmmakers from underrepresented regions, runs from August 5 to 10. The Alliance 4 Development co-development programme has selected feature projects from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. The Pardi di Domani — "Leopards of Tomorrow," the festival's showcase for emerging shorts and first features — includes established names like Ben Rivers among its 2026 selection (Locarno Film Festival).

For audiences and buyers alike, Locarno in early August remains one of the last major European festivals where discovery is the organising principle — not market saturation, not algorithmic recommendation, but a programmer's bet that a film nobody has heard of yet might be the one people remember.