The poster for the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival has been unveiled, featuring a character created by Cindy Sherman, rendered in stark black and white and wrapped in a yellow leopard-spotted headscarf.
It was produced exclusively for the festival by the renowned American artist.
“Through a practice rooted in staging, transformation and role‑play, Cindy Sherman has long shaped how we understand the construction of individual identities and the fictions that sustain them,” Locarno revealed.
“Working through a succession of invented personas, her photographs probe how visual culture – and especially cinema, from film noir and neorealism to classic Hollywood – manufactures and circulates what become stock, stereotypical images of women.”
For the 79th edition of Locarno, Sherman has created the official poster, reinterpreting the festival’s iconic leopard through her “signature language of masquerade and transformation”.
Describing her contribution as a “great honour”, she pays tribute to the festival’s “historical image of itself”: a constructed character appears in stark black and white, framed by a billowing leopard-print scarf rendered in a vivid, blazing yellow, suggesting both glamour and camouflage, revelation and disguise.
Maja Hoffmann, president of the Locarno Film Festival, said: “Cindy Sherman is one of the most influential artists of our generation. She transformed the way we perceive the world by using the camera not to document reality, but to expose how identity is staged, performed, and shaped by culture.”
Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director, added: “Sherman’s work asserts the inalienable right to self-expression and to the authorship of one’s own narratives in a moment in which alternative realities have increasingly started to replace the truth.
“In an age marked by global digital narcissism, the body re-emerges as a central medium through which we redefine both the role of images and our relationship to them.
“Draped in a leopard-patterned fabric, Sherman’s ecstatic gaze conveys a powerful tension between defiance and beauty – one that transcends the image itself, projecting outward into the world with a dreamlike intensity.”
The 79th Locarno Film Festival will take place from 5 to 15 August 2026.
