The Festival

In 1946, at the height of the cultural fervor of reconstruction, the home of quality cinema was built in Locarno, Switzerland. Thanks to its summer program, aimed at the general public and cinephiles alike, and to settings such as the democratic space of Piazza Grande – the world’s largest open-air cinema with 8,000 seats – the Locarno Film Festival offers a unique location to discover the best of national and international filmmaking: from fiction to documentaries, from feature films to shorts, from new cinematic frontiers to the rediscovery of treasures from the past.

Here, between the lake’s magical mirror and the peaks of Canton Ticino, meet the new talents of the moving image, members of the audiovisual industry, the masters of the seventh art, and those who want to enjoy, understand and discover cinema. A community that is growing and to whom numerous further activities are dedicated throughout the year.