Content area
Full text
A film festival that avoids being yet another circus of celebrities
FILM festivals, especially the big ones--Cannes, Berlin, Toronto--are rarely subtle. But Locarno, now in its 60th year and relatively modest in scale, steals a march with a pleasing piece of equipment. In the town's central square, the Piazza Grande, stands a giant screen with seating for 8,000. The treat for viewers was that, for the first week and a half of August, two films a night could be seen in the open air.
With the Alpine foothills that surround Lake Maggiore glowing in the dusk, there was no denying the sense of wellbeing this induced. If it rained, people could either stay or go to a 3,200-seat hall nearby called the Fevi (some, of course, just give up). In the piazza, over the first weekend, film-goers watched crowd-pleasers such as Paul Greengrass's "The Bourne Ultimatum", starring Matt Damon, the last in a Hollywood trilogy begun in 2002. They saw Robert Rodriguez's gore-fest, "Planet Terror", also from Hollywood, in which cannibalistic zombies are mown down by a one-legged...