Locarno and the Asian festival route for Pakistani films
Pakistani cinema does not travel to Europe and Asia through a single door. It travels through two, and they open at different times of year for different reasons. Locarno, in Switzerland, is a director's festival on the shore of Lake Maggiore, built around the Golden Leopard and a vast open-air screen in the Piazza Grande. Busan, in South Korea, is a discovery festival with an industry market attached. Understanding the difference explains why a Pakistani film can win the top prize in Switzerland and still struggle to finance its next project, and why a film that wins nothing in Korea can leave with a distributor.
What Locarno is, and what it rewards
Locarno has run since 1946 and takes place in August. Its main competition is small, around twenty titles, and its taste runs to formal invention and auteur signature rather than star casting or social-issue messaging. The Golden Leopard is the top prize. The festival also runs Filmmakers of the Present, a section for more experimental work, and Open Doors, a long-running programme for filmmakers from regions with fragile production infrastructure. For a director from a country with a thin art-house sector, that is unusually hospitable: a competition that values the frame more than the budget.
The one Pakistani title Locarno has already crowned
Khamosh Pani, released in 2003, is the case that matters. Directed by Sabiha Sumar, it is an Indo-Pakistani film about a widowed mother and her teenage son in a Punjabi village in 1979, as General Zia's Islamisation campaign reaches the village and the son drifts towards a militant group. It was shot in a Pakistani village and released in India as well. At the 56th Locarno International Film Festival it won the Golden Leopard for best film, plus best actress and best direction, seven awards in all across its run.
Note the phrasing: Indo-Pakistani. Khamosh Pani is not a film that a Pakistani producer could have made alone, and that is part of why it reached Locarno. Cross-border financing, a Punjabi-language script that works on both sides, and a director with a documentary background who had already screened abroad all made the film legible to a Swiss selection committee. The lesson is not that Pakistan needs Europe's permission. It is that the films which break through tend to arrive with more than one passport.
What Busan offers that Locarno cannot
Busan International Film Festival, held in October in the Haeundae district, was founded in 1996 as the first international film festival in Korea. Its stated focus is new films and first-time directors, especially from Asian countries, and its audience is young. It moved into the Busan Cinema Center in Centum City in 2011. In 1999 it created the Pusan Promotion Plan, renamed the Asian Project Market in 2011, which connects new directors to financiers, producers and sales agents before their films exist.
That market is the real reason Asian filmmakers go. A festival screening raises a film's profile for a week. A project market can fund the next three years of a director's work. Busan has also become structurally important in a way that has nothing to do with prizes: it is the only Asia-based festival included among the six designated festivals in the Academy's eligibility pathway for the international feature category, alongside Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance and Toronto. That status, granted for the 99th Academy Awards cycle, changes what a Busan selection is worth to a distributor.
How Dukhtar used the circuit
Dukhtar is a useful map of the route in practice. World premiere at Toronto in September 2014, in Discovery. Then, within weeks, Busan in October, the BFI London Film Festival for the European premiere, Films from the South in Oslo for the Scandinavian premiere, and Sao Paulo for the Latin American premiere. In November it played the 11th South Asian International Film Festival in New York, where it won best director and the audience award for best feature. It also took a jury special award for Asian cinema at the Bengaluru International Film Festival, and in December 2016 it screened at the first Pakistan Film Festival at the Asia Society in New York.
| Festival | Base and timing | What it does for a Pakistani film |
|---|---|---|
| Locarno | Switzerland, August | Top-tier competition, auteur prestige, Open Doors support structures |
| Busan | South Korea, October | Discovery for first features, Asian Project Market financing, Academy pathway |
| BFI London | United Kingdom, October | European premiere, UK press, diaspora audience |
| Films from the South | Norway, October | Scandinavian premiere, Nordic funding contacts |
| SAIFF | New York, November | South Asian diaspora audience, audience awards that sell DVDs |
| Bengaluru | India, winter | Regional jury recognition inside Asian cinema |
The economics nobody puts in the programme
Festival travel is not free and it is rarely funded by the festival. A director flying from Karachi to Zurich, then to Busan, then to London pays for most of it, and the cost lands on a film that has usually not sold a single territory. This is why the route is sequenced rather than simultaneous: a Toronto premiere buys press that makes the later festivals cheaper to attend. It is also why the market matters more than the screening. One meeting at the Asian Project Market with a producer who has financed three Nepali features is worth more, in cash terms, than a week of applause in Piazza Grande.
What this means if you are watching, not submitting
Follow the sections rather than the red carpets. Three dates are worth diarising:
- Locarno, August: the main competition and Filmmakers of the Present are where a Pakistani art film is most likely to appear.
- Busan, October: the best single survey of new South Asian cinema, and a film that premiered at Cannes or Toronto often reaches Korea the same year.
- New York, November: SAIFF and the Pakistan Film Festival at the Asia Society, where a film meets the diaspora audience that buys tickets at home.
None of this guarantees distribution. Khamosh Pani won Locarno's top prize in 2003, and Pakistani art cinema still took another decade to produce a film like Dukhtar, which then went to Toronto rather than Locarno. Two doors, and no straight corridor between them. Our Dukhtar festival journey traces the itinerary festival by festival, and the profile of Afia Nathaniel explains how a director builds the contacts that make such a route possible.
