Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh will serve as jury president of the international competition at the 78th Locarno Film Festival in August.
“Cinema offers the opportunity to discover new perspectives, cultures and stories,” Panh said. “If we have patience, cinema rewards us with its grace. Cinema can also preserve history, influence mindsets, and provide a space for reflection and escape. I am convinced that the diversity of viewpoints and narrative experiences enriches our understanding of the world. As the president of the jury, I wish to highlight films that celebrate this diversity and offer unique perspectives.”
Giona A. Nazzaro, Locarno’s artistic director, said: “Rithy Panh is widely regarded as a key figure in 20th-century cinema. His gaze has reinvented the forms of contemporary filmmaking, creating a historiography in images that has exerted an incalculable influence on countless film directors.
“As an authoritative witness of our time, his passionate search for truth, his anti-dogmatic approach, and his genuine commitment, as well as his capacity to move freely between the numerous forms of present-day filmmaking were the crucial elements that prompted us, spontaneously and enthusiastically, to offer him the task of president of the jury of the Concorso Internazionale at the 78th Locarno Film Festival.
“His artistic freedom and prolific, inexhaustible creativity make Mr. Rithy Panh the ideal figure to whom we can entrust those films, thus preparing them for the encounter with audiences from all over the world.”
Panh won the Silver Berlin Bear in 2022 for outstanding artistic contribution for “Everything Will Be OK” and won the Berlinale documentary award for “Irradiés” in 2020. He was nominated for a BAFTA for best film not in the English language for “First They Killed My Father” in 2018, and won the Un Certain Regard Award in Cannes for “The Missing Picture” in 2013.
Panh’s most recent film, “Meeting With Pol Pot” (2024), starring Irène Jacob and Grégoire Colin, debuted last year at the Cannes Film Festival.
The 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival takes place from Aug. 6-16.