79th EDITION OF THE LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SWITZERLAND: 5 to 15 August 2026
Locarno in August is never just a festival; it’s a controlled detonation of imagination.
In Locarno, the impossible doesn’t just find a screen.
It finds a home.
Locarno never feels like a festival; it feels like a fever dream that a whole town agrees to share.
In August 2026, the cobblestones of Piazza Grande vibrate under the weight of cinephiles, wanderers, critics with too many opinions, and dreamers with too few inhibitions.
The 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival unfolds like a cosmic carnival, and somewhere between the lake’s mirror‑calm surface and the mountains that guard the city like ancient sentinels, the speculative films of this year’s lineup begin to glow.
They don’t simply screen. They pulse.
The lake glimmers like a sheet of polished obsidian, the mountains loom like prehistoric guardians, and the Piazza Grande becomes a gravitational anomaly where reality bends just enough to let cinema slip through its cracks.
In 2026, the speculative films—SF, fantasy, fantastic, distopic, suprarealist—don’t simply populate the program. They haunt it.
“The House on the Moon” by the Singapore’s film director Nelson Yeo, erupts into the Concorso Internazionale (Main Competition) like a celestial disturbance.
It’s part science fiction, part Wu Xia martial arts, part whispered legend carried on lunar dust.
Nelson Yeo’s film feels engineered in a dream laboratory where martial‑arts masters spar with astrophysicists.
Viewers stumble out of the screening with the unmistakable sensation that gravity has briefly let go of their bones.
Then the delirium deepens with “Donkey Princess” (Princesa Burro) by the Chilian directors Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña.
Their stop‑motion grotesquerie is a dark fantasy stitched from nightmares that refuse to behave. A kingdom where love is forbidden, a magical bracelet that fractures reality, puppets that look carved from the subconscious of a feverish deity—everything conspires to pull the audience into a vortex of surreal tenderness and terror. Locarno thrives on this kind of beautiful derangement.
Canadian director Denis Côté arrives with “Nobody’s Violence” (Violence du corps de l’autre), a distopic drift through a world where euthanasia becomes a wandering service. The film doesn’t shock; it freezes. It leaves behind a thin layer of existential frost that clings to the skin long after the credits fade. In Locarno’s strange alchemy, even this chill becomes part of the festival’s heat.
French director Bertrand Mandico’s “Roma Elastica” slithers into Fuori Concorso (Out of Competition) like a neon serpent. Mandico doesn’t direct films—he summons visions. His elastic Rome bends, mutates, and glows with psychedelic textures, hybrid creatures, and ritualistic imagery that feels transmitted from a parallel dimension. People exit the theater laughing, crying, or both, unsure whether they’ve witnessed cinema or sorcery.
But 2026 brings more phantoms to Locarno’s nocturnal carnival.
Chinese director Sun Xun’s “Magic Atlas“, unfurls in Cineasti del Presente (Filmmakers of the Present Competition) like an illuminated manuscript torn from a mythological archive.
Sun Xun’s experimental animation—dense with magical symbolism, shifting cosmologies, and painterly hallucinations—feels like a spell cast frame by frame. The film doesn’t tell a story; it maps a universe that behaves according to its own arcane physics.
Ukrainian director Natalka Vorozhbyt’s “Demons” (Demony) stalks the same section with supernatural intent. It’s a fantastic horror that moves like a shadow with its own heartbeat. Vorozhbyt’s world is one where trauma and myth blur, where the supernatural isn’t an intrusion but a natural consequence of reality cracking under pressure.
Brazilian director Ana Vaz’s “Fire Flower” (Hanabi) blooms like a ritualistic ember. Experimental, poetic, fantastically metaphorical, the film behaves like a vision glimpsed through smoke. Vaz crafts cinema that feels less projected and more conjured—an offering to forces that remain unnamed.
Ann Oren’s “Objet a” (a German language film, a co-production between Germany’s Schuldenberg Films, Luxembourg’s Tarantula, and Greece’s Asterisk*), slinks through the program with psychological menace. A thriller soaked in surrealism, it toys with perception the way a cat toys with a trembling insect. Nothing is stable; everything is suggestion.
British director Beatrice Gibson’s “And At Night“, drifts in like a nocturnal whisper.
Neo‑noir soaked in fantastic atmosphere, the film feels like wandering through a city that dreams while you sleep.
Streetlights flicker like omens, shadows behave suspiciously, and the night itself becomes a character with ambiguous intentions.
And somewhere between these giants, the festival’s other speculative offerings flicker like fireflies: animated mythologies, supernatural horrors, experimental fantasies that refuse to sit still.
Locarno isn’t a genre festival, but in 2026 it behaves like one that has swallowed a star and is now radiating its energy through every alleyway and lakeside terrace.
By the time the festival reaches its final night, the air feels electrically charged.
The leopard‑spotted banners flutter like signals from another dimension.
The moon hangs low over the lake, as if checking the program.
And you realize that Locarno has done what it always does: it has turned cinema into a living organism, unpredictable and slightly dangerous, the kind that follows you home and whispers in your ear long after the credits fade.
The SF, fantasy, and fantastic films of Locarno 2026 don’t merely expand the imagination—they detonate it.
They leave you wandering through the Swiss night with the distinct sensation that reality has loosened its grip, just enough to let the impossible slip through.
And in Locarno, the impossible always finds a screen.
By the festival’s final night, Locarno feels transformed.
The leopard‑spotted banners flutter like signals from another dimension.
The moon hangs low over the lake, as if checking the program one last time.
You realize the speculative films of Locarno 2026 haven’t merely expanded the imagination—they’ve detonated it.
They’ve turned the Swiss summer into a shimmering hallucination where cinema becomes a living organism, unpredictable and slightly dangerous.
