Locarno Pro Boss on Building Long-Term Relations, Solving Investment Challenges, the Success of ‘Flow’
There will be high-profile film industry veterans, such as Poor Things, Pillion, and My Father’s Shadow producer Ed Guiney of Element Pictures, Yorgos Lanthimos’ longtime producer, Berlin Film Festival director Tricia Tuttle, and AGC Studios chairman and CEO Stuart Ford. A conversation between free-spirited Romanian auteur Radu Jude and Guiney about the relationship between director and producer will take people behind the scenes of the magic of movies to reveal the grind and the challenges. Comedian and disability advocate Maysoon Zayid (You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, General Hospital) will speak out to inspire dialogue in a session dubbed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Making Movies That Save Lives.” And there will be a lot of socializing.
Welcome to the 2025 edition of the Locarno Film Festival’s Locarno Pro industry strand, which is full of education and networking opportunities in the Swiss lakeside town and will run Aug. 7-12.
Oh yes, don’t forget the Locarno Pro awards ceremony on Aug. 10 and the Aug. 12 awards event for Open Doors, the co-production platform and talent development program for filmmakers from regions where artistic expression is at risk. This is the first year with a focus on Africa, with the spotlight being on six projects in development and six producers.
Plus, in collaboration with Telefilm Canada, Locarno Pro’s First Look initiative for works-in-progress will showcase six Canadian films currently in post-production.
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Markus Duffner, director of Locarno Pro, is clearly a busy man. But ahead of this year’s Locarno Film Festival, running Aug. 6-16, he took time to talk to THR about the newly launched Locarno Investment Community, mixing business and fun, and why his team focuses on sustainability.
Tell me a bit why you teamed with Oxbelly, a European nonprofit based in Greece that promotes collaboration between the U.S. and EU, to launch the Locarno Investment Community this year and why that makes so much sense right now?
We have members of several different professional categories attending from all over the world. And so there’s a bit for everyone at Locarno Pro, including the investment community. The European sector, mostly in independent cinema, the one we are mostly dealing with at the Locarno festival and Locarno Pro, is, I wouldn’t say, under threat, but facing some challenges when it comes to public financing. Public funding in general in Europe has been reduced, including for cinema, but also serial formats and other media are taking a piece of that cake.
So, on the one side, we have more and more projects. On the other side, it’s difficult and more competitive to get public funding. The budget is always the same or shrinking, generally, in Europe. So we wanted to open up this platform so that the investment community can also meet and learn about different funding options. We have around 45 private investors coming, and they are a real mix. There are funds for slate funding, meaning investing in a company rather than in a project. We have philanthropists. We have private people who are just interested in seeing how it’s possible to invest in film and media. We have banks that also have philanthropic projects to invest in. And then we have regular private equity investors. And then we have around 85 emerging talents, a mix of producers and filmmakers, that we select through our pre-selection committees. And these two groups, the investment community and our incubated talents, are then matched together.
That’s what our core business is really, creating an informal networking platform and matching people who could in the future work together. In terms of the investment community, this is useful for our talents, but I believe also for investors that are really trying to understand how it’s possible to fund cultural projects.
How does the investment community idea fit into a world that seems to become more divided and see more barriers being erected and how does it allow U.S. financiers to come in?
We had a lot of brainstorming sessions with Oxbelly last year and decided to give this a trial. But it’s also a question of network. We have a strong network in Europe. Oxbelly, especially its executive director Caroline von Kühn, most recently served as [director of industry & catalyst] at the Sundance Institute, so she had that background, which is a key tool to make this investment community work and integrate a few philanthropists from the U.S. I call them philanthropists, although there are some funds which also have philanthropic goals. But the idea is that in the U.S., private equity is better integrated into the financing system, while in the European independent circle, it isn’t so much. So we can train our incubated talents, but also create a platform where investors can learn how to actually invest. People who have maybe just approached one investment often don’t really understand what happened with the film and so on.
Having listened to you and others at Locarno Pro for a while, I have been picking up a certain focus on sustainability of relationships and education rather than flashy one-time gimmicks. Can you talk a bit about your longer- versus short-term focus?
You’re absolutely right. This is one of the things we really cherish. I think it’s the strongest part of Locarno, maybe unique when compared to everything that exists throughout the year at other festivals. That is really how curated our program and selected participants are, and how we work together with them, also after Locarno. We are proud of how many alumni we have in Locarno every year who were already part of our community in past editions. Someone who has participated in Locarno Pro will then be selected for the festival or for other sections or activities of the festival.
Do you have any examples?
Take the producer of Oscar winner Flow, Matīss Kaža, that was incubated at Locarno, who this year will be in Locarno presenting his next project in a special section we created and and we will launch this year called Latvian Film Previews. This will also celebrate Flow‘s Oscar, which we feel somehow is also part of Locarno’s legacy.
And who are some of the former Locarno Pro attendees in the festival lineup this year?
We have Don’t Let the Sun from Jacqueline Zünd. She was in the Alliance 4 Development [co-production program], and we’re quite happy that this happened in quite a short amount of time. Also, Valentin Merz, who was in the Locarno festival two years ago with De Noche los Gatos son Pardos, a project that was in our First Look program before, is this year going to present his next feature-length project, Chocolat Amer (Dark Chocolate).
Is there anything unusual or maybe surprising that you and your team tell Locarno Pro participants about the pitching process that you could share?
In the prep meetings we do with all the talents, we say don’t go out there and pitch yourself – just be a human being and talk about yourself. That allows for a much deeper connection. If you have lunch with someone for an hour, and they need to remember you, try to give them three project pitches in 10 minutes to remember. That doesn’t make sense. They will probably want to forget that experience instead. It’s something I’ve learned in the business myself – it’s better if you make a connection on a more human level.
Anything else you would like to share?
Well, this is my fifth year as head of Locarno Pro. I must say we have now reached a good balance of activities. The program is packed. But what we are trying to focus on is the quality of the people coming, because Locarno is an industry platform rather than a market. So the quality of the participants is really important. Also important is the idea of creating really good, and also fun, events that can be formative, such as this conversation we are doing about the director-producer relationship. We hope it will be a very fun conversation, and maybe one that is also eye-opening. We cherish this mix of the serious and the playful.
