This evening’s Piazza Grande screening in Locarno was preceded by an impassioned and elaborate demonstration mounted by local activists campaigning for an end to violence in Gaza.
The demonstration was brief and lasted no more than a few minutes on the Piazza Grande, where Miguel Ángel Jiménez’s latest feature, The Birthday Party, is screening.
Attendees at the Piazza held small placards that featured the text “Stop GENOCIDE. Words and actions for PEACE, against indifference,” printed in multiple languages, including English. The placards were also marked with cutouts of bandages painted red to symbolize blood.
The placards were handed out earlier this evening by a local activist group, which has no official name but includes residents from across the area of Ticino, Switzerland, the larger administrative region within which Locarno sits.
Similar Palestine protests took place at last year’s Locarno Film Festival. We wrote about the alternative Piazza Grande screening, which featured local activists and festival attendees gathering for an evening of film screenings about Palestine. That event was hosted by the local left-wing cooperative Coordinamento Unico a sostegno della Palestina/ Coordination in support of Palestine (Cusp).
Elsewhere this evening in Locarno, Beirut-based Abbout Productions, led by Georges Schoucair and Myriam Sassine, were handed the Raimondo Rezzonico Award for producing.
The Birthday Party is Jiménez’s eight feature and stars Willem Dafoe, who was present this evening in Locarno. The film is set in the late 1970s, somewhere in the Mediterranean, where Marcos Timoleon, an Aristotle Onassis-like tycoon, is throwing a lavish, extravagant birthday party for Sofia, his daughter and sole heiress, on his exclusive private island. The party is a perfect excuse for various people in his life to approach him with their own agendas. Tonight’s screening was the world premiere.
Locarno runs from August 6 to 16.
