"Welcome to Locarno, where your algorithm does not work anymore." That line, from festival artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, frames the programming philosophy behind the 79th Locarno Film Festival as it opens its doors on the shores of Lake Maggiore.

Nazzaro's pitch to audiences is straightforward: the festival is fully aware of what is happening in the world, and believes those realities can be addressed through cinema, storytelling, imagination and fantasy rather than through topical polemic (Deadline). He rejects the split between so-called popular films and "cinema for the highbrow few," arguing that different forms of cinematic art should coexist with equal rights and dignity in the same public space.

The opening film matters because it sets the tone. Nazzaro calls it "the opening beat of a concert," the first sound that tells an audience what kind of experience they have walked into. From there, the programme fans out across sidebars and competitions, with curated diversity built into the selection process. The festival has a limited number of slots and tries to pick differences not only in subjects and stories but also in the approach to cinematic form itself.

One example Nazzaro cites is Beatrice Gibson's first feature At Night, screening in the Cineastes of the Present sidebar — a section devoted to formally adventurous work. The film follows six women traversing Paris after dark, and for Nazzaro it ticks the festival's boxes for range in subject, story and cinematic language. The sidebar itself is a Locarno fixture, a space where emerging and boundary-pushing film-makers sit alongside more established names.

Nazzaro traces this curatorial approach back to his time heading Venice Critics' Week from 2016 to 2020. There, he championed early work by directors including Helena Wittmann (Drift), Bertrand Mandico (The Wild Boys) and Anna Eriksson (M) — names that were outside the mainstream at the time and have since become more established. The Locarno programme, he says, builds on that same instinct for welcoming new voices.

His stated dream is to liberate spectators from preconceived viewing choices — the films they think they want before they have seen them. He frames cinema as a freedom that cannot be predicted through algorithms or consumer habits, and says the goal is not to shape a programme around expectations of how cinema should be consumed today but to create a space where cinema can be experienced as an interruption.

For a festival audience, that means arriving in Locarno with no guarantees about what comes next. The programme asks viewers to trust the curation rather than the recommendation engine.