Internationally acclaimed Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner will serve as jury president of the Concorso Internazionale, overseeing the jury that will decide the winner of the Pardo d’Oro – the Golden Leopard – at the 77th Locarno Film Festival this August.
Born in Vienna in 1972, Jessica Hausner began her career in short films after studying at the Film Academy of Vienna, and from the very start her austere and distinctive films captivated and beguiled those who were fortunate to discover them. In many ways, Hausner’s presidency is a homecoming, since Locarno was the first international festival at which her work made an impression, taking home the main prize in the section Pardi di Domani for the short Flora in 1997. From this early success, she moved to Cannes with Inter-View (1999), her 45-minute graduation film, and later co-founded the production company coop99 which, besides Hausner’s own films and those of the other co-founders (Barbara Albert, Antonin Svoboda, and Martin Gschlacht), has also gone on to produce such high profile films as Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016) and Jasmila Žbaniæ’s Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020).
Hausner’s first feature films Lovely Rita (2001) and Hotel (2004) would both premiere in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, but arguably it wasn’t until Lourdes (2009), which debuted in competition at the Venice Film Festival and took home the FIPRESCI prize, that Hausner would begin to be considered among the truly signature voices of contemporary cinema. With her subsequent films, which include Amour Fou (2014), her English-language debut Little Joe (2019), and last year’s Club Zero (2023), Hausner has without a doubt cemented her place as one of the most remarkable contemporary filmmakers.
“It is a great honor and also a great pleasure for me to preside over the main jury of this year’s Locarno Film Festival”, says Jessica Hausner. “The responsibility I feel is to respectfully hear the various opinions of my fellow jury members, as I truly believe that every person sees a different film and that every perspective is interesting to discuss. For me, Locarno is a festival that values artistic and original approaches in filmmaking and thus reinforces the avant-garde of world cinema. I am happy to contribute to this agenda because filmmaking is, in my opinion, about challenging our perspectives and finding new and unusual ways to look at things”.
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director: “A vital and restless filmmaker, Jessica Hausner has created a diverse body of work reflecting the most hidden aspects of contemporary society with extraordinary depth. With clarity, steadfastness, and impeccable progression, she has imagined both spiritual and fantastical worlds that reflect the cogent richness of a complex and contradictory human experience. To have Jessica Hausner as jury president of the Locarno Film Festival’s Concorso Internazionale is an extraordinary honor and a guarantee that the films will be discussed by a jury led by one of the most extraordinary filmmakers working today”.
The jury of the Concorso Internazionale, chaired by Jessica Hausner, will award the Pardo d’Oro on the final day of the Festival, Saturday 17 August. The complete selection of Locarno77 will be announced in a press conference on Wednesday July 10.
