Following Greater China in 2009, the Locarno International Film Festival’s co-production lab Open Doors 2010 will focus on countries in central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kirghizistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan and Turkmenistan.
Organised with support from the Swiss Foreign Ministry’s Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the aim of the Open Doors is to assist the directors and producers of the projects selected to find co-production partners, particularly in Europe, and to be able to make their films. This year the section has a new manager, Martina Malacrida, 32, a graduate in the history and aesthetics of film and a journalist, who has had a long-standing working relationship with the Festival.

Olivier Père, the Festival’s Artistic Director, comments: «The central Asian New Wave, which had its moment of glory in the 1990s, is already long behind us. Today there is a new generation of very young filmmakers, who have come up through short filmmaking or the contemporary visual arts, waiting for a renewal of interest in their countries in the hope that their projects might find European co-production, festival exposure and an audience. In the past, the Locarno Festival has played an essential role in discovering several major auteurs from central Asia, such as Aktan Abdykalykov, Darezhan Omirbayev, Djamshed Usmonov; the forthcoming session of Open Doors will contribute to discoveries that are just as significant.»

Applications for Open Doors 2010, open to projects from central Asia, may be submitted from January onwards via the site www.pardo.ch. A dozen candidates will be selected to participate in Open Doors Factory, which will take place during the next edition of the Locarno Festival. Open Doors Screenings will run alongside, presenting a series of screenings of earlier work from the directors invited to the workshop, and a selection of films that are representative of recent production in central Asia. A round table on central Asian cinema will bring together producers and filmmakers from the region.


The 63rd Locarno International Film Festival will take place 4-14 August, 2010.