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Correction: Wednesday, August 21, 2013: Locarno Film Festival: An article about the Locarno Film Festival in the Aug. 20 Calendar section said that "Manakamana" received a top prize but didn't identify the section of the competition it won. The movie by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez took the top prize in the Filmmakers of the Present section for first and second films.
Modern-day film festivals are multiheaded beasts. Many tribes circulate within this increasingly crowded global ecosystem -- filmmakers, critics, buyers, sellers, programmers, sponsors and, of course, the paying public -- and each is a constituency with its own interests and needs. One consequence of this enforced plurality is that big festivals often lack a point of view: The something-for-everyone approach tends to preclude a strong curatorial stance.
The Locarno Film Festival, which concluded its most recent edition Saturday, is a vibrant exception to this rule, a festival that pulls off the tricky task of being at once diverse and cohesive. Given the picturesque setting -- a lakeside town in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, with its annual influx of summer vacationers -- the public is always a foremost consideration.
Up to 8,000 viewers swarm into the town's Piazza Grande nightly, filling the sea of black and yellow chairs (in accordance with the festival's ubiquitous leopard motif) for al fresco screenings.
These prime-time slots are typically reserved for likely crowd-pleasers (Richard Curtis' time travel romance "About Time," Sebastian Lelio's feel-good "Gloria," about a 60ish...