A real leopard named Bagheera, photographed in the English countryside, greets audiences before every screening at the Locarno Film Festival — the 79th edition of which runs 5–15 August 2026 in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland (The Hollywood Reporter).

The leopard is everywhere at Locarno: on banners, on posters, on the walls behind press conferences. Its top prize is the Pardo d'Oro, or Golden Leopard, and the festival hands out a constellation of other Leopard awards to filmmakers across its programme. This year, James Gray receives the Career Leopard (Pardo alla Carriera), Darren Aronofsky takes the Honorary Leopard (Pardo d'Onore), presented on 14 August in the Piazza Grande, actress Virginie Efira collects the Leopard Club Award, and Zoe Saldaña picks up a Special Leopard (The Hollywood Reporter).

The leopard was not always Locarno's animal. The festival adopted it in 1968, renaming its top award the Golden Leopard to stand apart from Venice's Golden Lion and Rotterdam's Tiger (The Hollywood Reporter). For decades the big cat lived mostly as a graphic motif. That changed in 2008, when a real leopard became the festival's living public face. Bagheera, the current leopard, took over in 2024 after the festival team travelled to the Cotswolds in England in 2023 to meet and photograph her (The Hollywood Reporter).

Behind the imagery is a small production team. Michele Jannuzzi of the design firm Jannuzzi Smith served as creative director for the leopard shoot, and the celebrated wildlife photographer Tim Flach captured both still images and the animal's movements, which are used in the short pre-film trailers that play before every screening on Locarno's screens (The Hollywood Reporter). For the 77th edition in 2024, Annie Leibovitz shot a leopard-and-Alpine image that became that year's official poster (The Hollywood Reporter).

Giona A. Nazzaro, the festival's artistic director, explained the choice of animal to The Hollywood Reporter: "The leopard is different from a lion, in the sense that it's a bit faster, it's leaner, and it inhabits the feline kingdom in a very specific way" (The Hollywood Reporter). Nazzaro and his team are responsible for assembling the festival lineup each year.

What makes the leopard unusual among festival symbols is its literalness. Cannes has its palm; Berlin its bear; Venice its lion — all rendered as statuettes and logos. Locarno goes further, putting a living, breathing animal at the centre of its visual identity, photographed by some of the world's best-known image-makers. A festival that prides itself on discovery, on films that move fast and strike precisely, chose the one big cat that fits that description.