Locarno began as a social event to attract tourists and originally screened films in the Grand Hotel garden before expanding across town and making the Piazza Grande an iconic 8,000-seat open-air theater. The festival has historically balanced commercial imperatives with curatorial daring, programming mainstream titles alongside left-field and experimental works. Locarno was early to include films from the Socialist Bloc, pairing Hollywood fare with Soviet and Chinese productions. That balancing act remains central to programming under artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, who has emphasized eclecticism and support for emerging and experimental cineastes.
Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town-none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater-the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno's Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they're watching Giacomo Gentilomo's My Sun -a crowd-pleaser with which the festival, just relocated from Lugano, opened the first edition in the city it'd be renamed after.
Launched as a primarily social event in the hopes of attracting more tourists to the Swiss shores of its lake, Locarno's historically juggled commercialist imperatives and curatorial bravado. But for every big title that graced the screen at the Grand Hotel and elsewhere, the organizers always found ways to squeeze in more left-field offerings-this was one of the very first festivals in the West to welcome films from the Socialist Bloc, sandwiching John Wayne vehicles between Soviet and Chinese productions.
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