USI at the Locarno Film Festival: the schedule

At the Locarno Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious film events, USI's presence continues to grow. In the festival's 79th edition, the Institute of Media and Journalism (IMeG) presents the third edition of the Future of Cinema Conference, a new escape room experience, Web Genesis: Operazione Verità, the REAL Academy summer school, and three USI video essays in a Swiss student film showcase. Below is all the information on the scheduled events.

Imagining a World of Cinema Together

USI’s Future of Cinema Conference provides the festival with a platform for critical dialogue and creative exploration of cinema. This year’s edition, titled The Future (of) Together, jointly organised with Locarno Factory and supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, runs from 10 to 12 August and attracts scholars and artists from around the world. The program is highlighted by evening lectures and musical performances at the Castello Visconteo in Locarno, including the multimodal presentation Cinema About Many People by Shaina Anand of the international collective CAMP. A screening at the PalaCinema presents 12 video essays centred on the theme of togetherness. The events are free and open to all.

From 6 to 14 August, at Museo Casorella, the installation Vis-à-Vis / Twice Told, curated by USI doctoral students Silvia Cipelletti, Marine de Dardel and Flavia Mazzarino, will be open to visitors, bringing together audiovisual works in dialogue with one another around the theme of togetherness. The conference is also the launch site for the new multimodal volume The Future of Reality (Diaphanes Books), which presents the results of last year's conference.

A New Escape Room on the Birthplace of the Web
From 5 to 15 August, at Largo Zorzi, Web Genesis: Operazione Verità places festival-goers inside one of the internet's most important origins. Participants enter a recreated CERN office in Geneva, where the World Wide Web took shape, and have 30 minutes to save the history of the Web from inaccurate reconstructions generated by artificial intelligence by solving puzzles based on documents, testimonies, and historical sources. The escape room is part of Once Upon a Time in the Web. Exploring, Interacting and Dialoguing with the World Wide Web of the 1990s, an Agora project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and led by IMeG's Prof. Gabriele Balbi together with Giulio Zaccarelli at SUPSI's Institute of Design. Key partners include RSI, with which a seven-episode audio fiction and three videos for RSI EDU were produced.

An Academy for Cinema’s Next Generation
The 2026 edition of REAL Academy, run by IMeG in collaboration with Locarno Factory, received a particularly high number of applications from around the world. From 5 to 15 August, the Academy welcomes 21 participants from 15 countries, including USI Masters of Media Management student Sean Mürner. The 2026 edition also strengthens the new collaboration with REAL Chile, established in November 2025 when a REAL Academy delegation travelled to Chile to inaugurate the partnership. During the Festival, a REAL Chile delegation will visit Locarno to deepen the academic exchange between REAL Locarno and REAL Viña del Mar. This international composition reflects the Academy's ambition to become a global meeting place for students, young filmmakers, researchers and media professionals interested in the ethical, aesthetic and narrative challenges of representing contemporary reality.

Student Films in the Festival
Will Rowan, a participant in REAL Academy 2025, has his video essay Film Fever featured in this year's Film Foundry, the annual showcase of outstanding works from Swiss film, television and animation schools. Rowan’s work appears alongside those of two other USI Masters students. Sofia Pasotti’s To Be (Not) in Love with JAMES explores emotional attachment to AI-based chatbots, while Rodolfo Cerè’s From Americanization to Burgerization traces how Hollywood's images reshaped European food habits.