THE Locarno Film Festival is launching a one-of-a-kind competition, offering a free full restoration service of a selected vintage cinema classic.

The competition is part of the Swiss festival’s Heritage Online program which was launched in 2021 when its industrial side Locarno Pro branched out into vintage cinema by creating a platform that serves as a database of film titles whose premieres took place before 2005.

The objective of the festival dedicated to independent cinema is to play an active role in restoring older films to their former glory and also to become a business facilitator between rights holders and distributors of classic films, streaming platforms and other outlets.

The new Locarno Heritage Online Competition is open to feature films from around the world that premiered no later than 2009. Applicants must prove that they are the rightful owners of submitted works requiring partial or full restoration. Applications will be open from March 8 to April 28.

Film lab Cinegrell, based in Berlin and Zurich, is offering a free full restoration service of the period work which will be selected by an unspecified jury of three international industry professionals, according to a statement.

The restoration of the selected film will begin in the fall of 2023 and the new copy will premiere at the festival in 2024.

Cinegrell has previously partnered with Locarno on restorations of Canadian author Denis Côté’s 2007 experimental work ‘Our Private Lives’ (‘Our Private Lives’) and with Portugal’s Cinemateca Portuguesa on the 1992 drama of Manoel De Oliveira “O dia do Despero”.

“Only a strong sensitivity to cinematographic heritage and to the still unexplored parts of its history can allow a festival to position itself as a credible interlocutor vis-à-vis cinema at a time when the moving image and audiovisual are going through a moment of historic transition,” Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro said in a statement.

Head of Locarno Pro, Markus Duffner, commented: “Heritage Online’s mission to bring our cinematic heritage back to life goes hand in hand with the need for updated and restored cinematic materials, allowing classic titles to fit into new distribution models available on the market. and even then, not just there. We are delighted to be able to further consolidate our collaboration with our long-standing partner Cinegrell and thus contribute further to the ongoing restoration of our common cinematographic heritage.

In a separate but related development, Locarno Pro’s Heritage Online initiative will dedicate an entire day to the vintage film industry on Monday 7 August with panel discussions on the state of heritage film distribution, case studies and presentations of newly restored films, as well as screenings of industry classics. The complete Heritage Mondays program will be announced in July.

The 76th Locarno Film Festival will take place from August 2 to 12. Locarno Pro will take place from August 3 to 8.