The Continuing Saga of the Rain

Day 4 - Saturday, 5 August

The lousy weather has become a standard topic of conversation, and many claim this is the worst festival - climatically speaking - that they've ever seen. So as to keep the festival-goers informed, the Locarno official website (www.pardo.ch) displays two webcams: one for the weather and another fixed on the Piazza Grande giant screen.

The turn-of-the-century film The House of Mirth by Terence Davies was to have been the Piazza screening Saturday night, shown instead in the Rex and Fevi theatres to full houses. So full, that by popular demand, two extra screenings in a smaller Fevi theatre were added to accomodate. Based on the classic Edith Wharton novel, Gillian Anderson (X-Files) gives a stunning performance as Lily Bart, a ravishing socialite at the height of her success who quickly discovers the precariousness of her position when her beauty and charm start attracting unwelcome interest and jealousy.

The nine-member jury announced their election of Naum Klejman as jury president. Film historian and critic, Klejman is the director of Moscow's Russian cinema museum. "There are two positions for a jury: to be a judge or to be a king," declared Klejman at the jury press conference.

The general public will also have their say. At each screening, those in attendance are handed the audience vote slips allowing them to give 1 or 2 stars to the evening film. The Audience Prize will be attributed to the film that accumulates the most number of stars, to be announced at the closing ceremony on 12 August. In addition to the Leopard of Honor being bestowed to Paul Verhoeven, the festival also honored filmmaker Jean-Pierre Pollet with a Leopard for his lifetime achievement. Considered an artisan of modernity, Pollet is presenting Ceux d'en face in the Video Competition.

Festival-goers are also comprised of a large number of festival and cinematography institution representatives as well as distributors and television buyers, all on the lookout for films for their programs. Other noted personalities include Commissioner Vivane Reding from the Education, Culture and Audiovisual department of the European Commission who is in Locarno to participate in the symposium Millennium Companies: The New European Distributors. MEDIA is the Commission's program developed to strengthen European film distribution and promotion and Ms Reding is going to address and explore ways to further the European film industry during her four-day visit.

Also in Leopard country is lion-hearted film veteran Dario Argento, special guest at the Italian Cinema party lakeside Sunday evening, who will surely divulge some of the details on his latest film in the works, Non ho sonno. A former contributor to the scripts of Sergio Leone's westerns (remember the opening sequence of Once Upon A Time in the West? That's him), Dario Argento has since made his mark and cut a dash with visually accomplished, exquisitely choreographed pieces of brutal killing (known as "gialli"), the latest of which featured his actress-turned-director daughter Asia Argento. A survivor in the desolate landscape of 80s Italian cinema, daddy certainly contributed to its late 90s revival through his stubborn allegiance to the realm of red-handed deviations.