Here's the Locarno Academy 2019. Or rather, the three Locarno Academies 2019. These are the 42 star players who, spread across Filmmakers, Critics and Industry, will breather life into eleven days of encounters, sharing and growth. Like every year, the Locarno Academy will open the doors to the entire film world for the new generations of filmmakers, critics and professionals. It's a wave of youth coming from all over the world, from Pakistan to Nigeria, from Senegal to Azerbaijan, from Switzerland to Lebanon, selected by the Locarno Film Festival for the Academy days.
 

The 20 of the Filmmakers Academy

The Filmmakers Academy is taking place once again, this year with a selection of 20 directors from 16 different countries. During the 11 days of the Festival, the filmmakers will be offered a quality programme of appointments and meetings with prestigious guests of the 72nd edition.

The selection is characterised by a wide diversity of backgrounds and identities, as well as styles in their way of telling stories through the seventh art. It represents a veritable seismograph, capturing all the movements in progress within the emerging filmmaking scene across the world.

The selection includes two talents from Nepal and Pakistan who were already guests of past editions of Open Doors, two directors from Senegal and South Africa who are part of the Realness residency, 6 talents from the Cannes Cinéfondation, and a resident director of the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai.

All of them share a moment of great creative challenge as they embark on the preparations of their first feature film.

On four evenings open to the public, the Locarno Film  Festival will host screenings of a selection of short films by the filmmakers: the Academy Screenings.

The 12 of the Critics Academy

The 12 exceptional young writers picked for the Critics Academy will take an active part in the Locarno Festival, attending film screenings and academy workshops, writing reviews of titles in the program and articles on ancillary events, and interviewing prominent guests.

This year’s participants come from backgrounds as varied as Pakistan, Mexico, Netherlands, and Nigeria. As well as taking an active part in workshops about the practice of film criticism, their reflections and long-form essays on Locarno72 will be published by Film Comment, IndieWire, Locarno Live, MUBI Notebook, Variety, and in Swiss media such as Filmbulletin, Filmexplorer.ch, Cineman.ch and Swiss.info.

The 10 of the Industry Academy

For the upcoming generation of professionals, Locarno Pro’s Industry Academy is a unique opportunity to discover and learn more about the world of the film industry and its challenges. This year our 10 talented participants come from diverse and complementary fields. Collaboration and creativity are our motto, and we aim at offer these young people a better understanding on how to work together.

The selected participants for 2019 work in the fields of traditional and digital distribution, international sales, festivals programming and exhibition. They come from Netherlands, Switzerland, Azerbaijan, Germany, France, Lebanon United-Kingdom, Czech Republic and Portugal and are charting remarkable and unique paths in the film Industry. The Industry Academy will not only offer them a perfect opportunity to interact with a group of top-level professionals, but also to quiz the experts and enhance their own hands-on professional experience, while gaining insights into the work of their colleagues.