This week on #LocarnoMeets, we sat down with Alexander Payne, the comedic genius behind some of the best films of the past three decades, including “The Holdovers”, “Election”, and “Sideways”. He joined us to discuss his career, working with George Clooney on “The Descendants”, and his low, low budgets.

Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji’s latest film (“Irkalla: Gilgamesh's Dream”), which premiered on the Piazza Grande during Locarno78, was hailed as a major achievement, both in terms of its artistry and the circumstances of its production. He joined us to discuss the myth of Gilgamesh, shooting a movie in Baghdad, and being shot at in Baghdad.

When, in August 2025, we had the honour of awarding the Raimondo Rezzonico Award to the Lebanese independent company Abbout Productions – founded by Georges Schoucair and Myriam Sassine – we could never have imagined that, just a few months later, we would find ourselves facing the current dramatic international situation and that war would be raging harsher than ever in Lebanon.

At the time, in Locarno, these two outstanding producers joined our podcast to discuss their careers and the future of Lebanese cinema. We spoke about the trauma of the Beirut explosion in 2020, the work of creative producing and the Arab film community, as well as their films “Costa Brava, Lebanon” and “Memory Box”.

Serving as head of the Locarno78 jury last year, Rithy Panh is a legend of Cambodian cinema. Over his thirty year career, he has tirelessly interrogated the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge with creativity and originality. He joined us on the latest episode of #LocarnoMeets to talk about movies, TikTok, and the demagogues of the tech world.

Vicky Krieps is one of the definitive European actors of her generation. But her new film, the astonishing “Yakushima's Illusion”, which world premiered at Locarno78, dropped her deep into an ancient forest on the eponymous Japanese island, the mystical place that once served as, among other things, the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki's “Princess Mononoke”. We talked about preparing for a role as a pediatric heart surgeon, adapting to the sounds of the forest, and the challenge of accommodating the Japanese way of doing things.

Best known for “21 Bridges” and his work on television shows like “Game of Thrones”, director Brian Kirk’s much anticipated new film is the icy thriller “The Dead of Winter” starring Emma Thompson in a bravura role as a steely Minnesotan widow named Barb. As the film premiered to acclaim on the Piazza Grande at Locarno78, we sat down with Kirk to dig into the mechanics of shooting in snow and collaborating with a living legend.

Nadia Tereszkiewicz is the actor at the heart of “Heads of Tails?” an award-winning new spaghetti western by Italian filmmaking duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. This magnetic actress joined us on the latest episode of LocarnoMeets to talk about “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, John C. Reilly, corsets, and horses.

The Swiss director, cinematographer, and close collaborator on some of Jean-Luc Godard’s final works Fabrice Aragno made his debut as a feature filmmaker at Locarno78 with the hypnotic “Le Lac”, a near-wordless experimental romantic drama that takes place during a sailing competition on Lake Geneva.

Aragno joined us on Locarno Meets to discuss his work to capture the spirit of the lake itself, why every film is a documentary of its own making, what it meant to see “La Notte” as a young man, and the profound personal influence of working so long and so closely with JLG.