Three film executives walked onto a panel in Locarno and could not agree on the order of the words in their own theme.

Locarno Pro, the industry strand of the Locarno Film Festival, opened on 6 August 2026 for its 15th edition in the Swiss lakeside city, running through 11 August. The theme: "Power. People. Data." The programme of panels and keynotes kicked off with the traditional StepIn session, which this year explores how power structures operate in the film business (Hollywood Reporter).

Markus Duffner, now in his sixth year heading Locarno Pro, presides over a strand described as a platform for anticipating and addressing the challenges facing the European film industry (Hollywood Reporter). Data and AI in decision-making are among the market dynamics on the table this year (Screen Daily).

The StepIn panel featured Yasmine Talli, head of production at mk2 Films; Andrea Occhipinti, president and founder of Italian distributor Lucky Red; and Doris Ruth Eikhof, CEO of Design Otherwise, a University of Glasgow spin-out focused on improving inclusion and diversity in the cultural sector. AC Coppers of The Catalysts moderated (Hollywood Reporter).

Eikhof argued the correct order is power, then data, then people. Occhipinti countered: people first, then power, with data as a tool. Talli proposed a third sequence — people, data, power — reasoning that people need to gather data in order to keep power (Hollywood Reporter).

The sharpest divide came over whether algorithms should pick films at all. Occhipinti said Lucky Red does not use them to choose what to distribute or produce, relying instead on instinct, sensitivity and experience. He cited two cases where conviction trumped what the data would have predicted: Pawel Pawlikowski's black-and-white Polish drama Ida and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight — both films that, on paper, were not expected to succeed (Hollywood Reporter).

Lucky Red does collect data of a kind: community responses to films, which Occhipinti treats as a form of information rather than a spreadsheet-driven verdict. The company, recently majority-acquired by StudioCanal, is one of Italy's longest-standing independent distributors (Hollywood Reporter).

Locarno Pro's wider 2026 programme stretches well beyond a single panel. The MatchMe! networking programme runs 7–9 August (Locarno Festival). First Look, the works-in-progress section selecting six features, has set its focus on Uruguay (Hollywood Reporter). The festival itself, in its 79th edition, has unveiled juries including Paulina Garcia and Lolita Chammah, daughter of Isabelle Huppert, and a competition lineup featuring films from Hong Sang-soo, Albert Serra, Vincent Grashaw and Erin Vassilopoulos (Hollywood Reporter).

What makes the panel worth watching is not that anyone won the argument. It is that three people who buy, sell and study films for a living cannot agree on whether the numbers serve the people or the people serve the numbers — and that question is being asked in an industry where StudioCanal can buy a distributor like Lucky Red overnight, but cannot algorithm its way to the next Ida.