Locarno 79: "The Counter-Algorithm Is a Human Being Who Gives a Damn"

The 79th Locarno Film Festival opens August 5, 2026, carrying a proposition: the human programmer is the counter-algorithm. While streaming platforms use behavioral data to determine what audiences should see next, a film festival's artistic director makes curatorial decisions that no dataset can replicate. That argument, stated explicitly in Locarno's StepIn think tank materials obtained by Variety, is the festival's formal response to the question of what human film culture is for in the age of AI recommendation systems.

The festival runs August 5 to 15 in Locarno, Switzerland. The 79th edition presents 233 total works, including 51 features, 81 shorts, and 1 series. The main screening venue is the Piazza Grande, an open-air lakeside cinema that functions as the festival's signature image: thousands of spectators watching films under the night sky with the Alps visible in the distance.

"Power, People, Data and the Future of Film"

Locarno's StepIn think tank, a film industry forum that runs alongside the main competition, has organized its 2026 edition around the theme "Power, People, Data and the Future of Film." The forum brings together filmmakers, distributors, platform executives, and critics to discuss where the film industry is heading. The counter-algorithm framing is StepIn's governing concept for 2026.

The phrase comes directly from festival materials shared with Variety: "The counter-algorithm is a human being who gives a damn." It is both a description of what a film programmer does and a claim about what that work is worth. Algorithms optimize for engagement metrics derived from past behavior. A programmer selects films based on judgment, aesthetic values, and a belief that audiences can be introduced to work they did not already know they wanted.

Artistic Director Giona A. Nazzaro told The Hollywood Reporter that the 2026 program is intended to be "adventurous" specifically as a counterpoint to algorithmic recommendation culture. His premise is that recommendation systems narrow audiences toward what they have already demonstrated they will watch. A festival committed to adventurous programming is the structural alternative.

233 Works, One Open Air Screen

The international competition selection includes Hong Sang-soo (South Korea), Denis Côté (Canada), Albert Serra (Spain), Lê Bảo (Singapore/Vietnam), Ann Oren, Florin Serban, and León & Cociña. This lineup is consistent with Locarno's longstanding preference for formally ambitious international work over commercially positioned prestige cinema. None of these filmmakers has a studio infrastructure behind them. Each arrives based on the artistic director's judgment, which is precisely the point the festival is making.

Tributes at the 79th edition go to James Gray and Darren Aronofsky. Both directors represent a generation of filmmakers who built careers on personal vision within, and sometimes against, American studio infrastructure. Their presence at a festival arguing for human curation over algorithmic programming is contextually appropriate.

Human Curation as Counter Programming

Nazzaro's argument is not that recommendation algorithms are bad at their function. They are good at their function, which is returning content similar to what a user has previously engaged with. His argument is that this function is insufficient for cinema's cultural role.

A festival can show a film from a first-time director in a language spoken by few people in the audience, by a filmmaker who has no commercial profile in any territory where tickets will be sold. That decision is a bet on artistic judgment over demonstrated market preference. An algorithm cannot make that bet because algorithms do not make bets; they reflect the aggregate behavior of past users.

The counter-algorithm framing also addresses what festivals offer to filmmakers directly. A Locarno selection creates a global moment for a film that streaming distribution might never generate. A film placed in an algorithm's recommendation queue competes silently against every other piece of content on the platform. A film screening in the Piazza Grande in front of thousands of people has an audience, a context, and a press response that exists nowhere else in the world. The economic logic of the two distribution channels is entirely different.

The Hollywood Blacklist Retrospective

The 79th edition's retrospective focuses on the Hollywood blacklist, the period between 1947 and 1960 when approximately 300 writers, directors, and actors were refused employment in the American film industry based on alleged Communist sympathies. Many worked under pseudonyms or had their credits removed entirely.

No press coverage of the 2026 Locarno program has noted what the programming choices placed next to each other. The festival is simultaneously running a think tank on AI's relationship to human authorship and a retrospective on a historical episode in which human authors were stripped of credit for their work based on political association.

The parallel is not exact. The blacklist stripped credit for ideological reasons; AI authorship debates involve questions of whether human credit is warranted at all when machine tools generate content. But both are crises about who gets named as the author of creative work, and under what conditions that naming can be challenged or removed. Locarno placed both conversations in the same program. Whether intentionally or not, the juxtaposition is coherent.

The blacklist retrospective also serves the counter-algorithm argument in a less obvious way. The writers who survived the blacklist often did so through informal networks, underground screenings, and the advocacy of individuals who valued their work independent of its commercial or political profile. That is a description of what film festival culture has historically provided to work that the mainstream market cannot accommodate. The Piazza Grande is the institutional version of that function at scale.

Locarno Among the Major European Festivals

Cannes 2026 banned generative AI from its official competition, instituting the first categorical prohibition at a major film festival. The decision created an explicit line between AI-generated work and Palme d'Or eligibility.

Locarno has taken a philosophically different approach. There is no AI ban in the 79th program. The festival's position is expressed through its curatorial philosophy, not through eligibility rules. Identifying the programmer as "the counter-algorithm" is a statement about human value, not a restriction on what tools filmmakers may use.

Venice 2026 has similarly not announced categorical AI restrictions, relying on Artistic Director Alberto Barbera's individual film evaluation rather than rule-based exclusions. The three major European festivals opening in close succession, Locarno in August, Venice in late August, and the fall festival circuit that follows, now represent three distinct positions on how film institutions should relate to AI tools: prohibit, evaluate individually, or name human curation as the philosophical response.

The Reply AI Film Festival running concurrently at Venice shows the parallel track that exists for specifically AI-focused work. AI generated films have dedicated festivals designed to receive them. The question the major festivals are answering with their positioning is which films belong in the main competition, not whether AI films exist as a category.

Independent filmmakers developing projects for festival submission can generate video, test visual concepts, and produce proof-of-concept footage through AI FILMS Studio's video workspace.

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Sources

Variety | The Hollywood Reporter | Screendaily | Deadline | The Film Stage