The Locarno Film Festival is a major international film festival, held annually in Locarno, Switzerland. Founded in 1946, the festival screens films in various competitive and non-competitive sections, including feature-length narrative, documentary, short, avant-garde, and retrospective programs. The Piazza Grande section is held in an open-air venue that seats 8,000 spectators.
Piazza Grande screening venue
The open-air screening of the Locarno Film Festival on the Piazza Grande is featured on the Swiss twenty-franc banknote since 2017.
The screen in the Piazza Grande
Night life during the Festival, Locarno City Garden.
A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually in a single city or region. Increasingly, film festivals show some films outdoors. Films may be of recent date and depending upon the festival's focus, can include International and Domestic releases. Some film festivals focus on a specific filmmaker, genre of film, or subject matter. Several film festivals focus solely on presenting short films of a defined maximum length. Film festivals are typically annual events. Some film historians, including Jerry Beck, do not consider film festivals as official releases of the film.
The Venice Film Festival is the oldest film festival in the world and one of the most prestigious and publicized.
Traverse City Film Festival and their giant inflatable movie screen.
A queue to the 1999 Belgian-French film Rosetta at the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Finland, in 2005.
Swedish director and screenwriter Johannes Nyholm (right) presenting Koko-di Koko-da at Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema 2019.