Meet & Discuss on the Piazza grande

An ephemeral concept

Tsai Ming-liang’s presence has been cause for a highly inspiring encounter at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival. Filmexplorer began its Locarno experience with his serene and smiling statements about the delight for radical cinema and with its minimalist play between the cinema screen and the art space. Films happen between the screen and our minds, but also physically in-between, through the physical sharing of intimate experiences with other people.

So when Kevin B. Lee explained the reason for his invitation of Tsai to Locarno in order to make him a sort of spokesperson for a cinema of attentive, bodily, responsive presence, we as Filmexplorer felt perfectly “tuned” to the most visionary spirit of the Locarno Film Festival. Why? Because we had already planned to travel to Locarno with the idea of reducing the full schedule of the film screenings (Tsai also spoke of his gradual process of subtraction in his artistic career…) in order to leave room for a one-hour ephemeral discussion per day. This is the concept: every day we “hover” on the Piazza grande for one hour, same time, same spot, in order to let chance make us meet people and freely discuss films. Without the intention of making these discussions profitable for publications.

The rigour of ephemerality has been broken only twice – the exceptions prove the rule – with people coming from very far away: the film programmers Sung Moon from South Korea and Marcelo Alderete from Buenos Aires, and the film critic and curator Yun-hua Chen, from Taiwan and Berlin, spoke with us spontaneously about their reception of the films at the festival.

On the contrary, the rigour of ephemerality helped to keep passionate discussions wonderfully nestled in between the folds of personal and collective time. Sometimes we could get an interpretative key in order to understand a film that had us bored, or recognize an interesting problem in a film that apparently convinced us. Sometime, it was rather the occasion of raising again the big questions about cinema, its production, the coherence of authors, such as during the frank exchange between Lav Diaz and Albert Serra accompanied by the skilled mediation of Stefano Knuchel – who Filmexplorer (Ruth Baettig, Giuseppe Di Salvatore, Lara Perren, PM Cicchetti, Jean Perret, Emilien Gür and Maria Di Salvatore on place) give many thanks, and also for taking time to share their reception of films, to Alan Mattli, Alessandro Stellino, Anuk Schmelcher, Beat Schneider, Christoph Oertli, Daniel Wiegand, Domenico Pedroli, Dominic Schmid, Erica C.C. Lin, Felix Schenker, Georg Kling, Hannes Brühwiler, Isabelle Papaloizos, Johannes Binotto, John Canciani, Jürg Neuenschwander, Libertad Gills, Luciano Barisone, Mario Timbal, Matthias Lerf, Michael Papaloizos, Nora Longatti, Sebastian Seidler, Selina Dettwiler and Matts, Silvia Posavec, the students of the HSLU, Susanne Guggenberger, Thomas Allenbach and Tommaso Donati.

See you next year on the Piazza grande!