Business

For the fifteenth consecutive year, Eclair Theatrical Services is a partner of the Locarno Film Festival for this year’s edition, “Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films”.

An annual meeting of professionals and film lovers, the Locarno Film Festival, which will be held from 5 to 15 August 2020, had to review its format this year to adapt to the health regulations in place to stem the COVID-19 crisis. The first Festival to reopen with physical programming alongside its online programming, Locarno will once again delight fans this year in three of its legendary cinemas: the GranRex, Palacinema and PalaVideo. Eclair Theatrical Services will support the Festival by overseeing the encoding and quality control of the feature films and shorts presented on this occasion. With a dozen screenings each day, dozens of contents from various sources are verified, encoded, and delivered to the site in a very short period of time, the official selection being announced less than a month before the Festival’s opening.

“The Locarno Film Festival is, for Eclair Theatrical Services’ teams in Liège-Barchon, a highlight of the year, involving a mobile digital laboratory called LABO * IN which ensures tremendous flexibility and tailor-made service. As a long-time partner of the Festival, we are delighted that this year’s edition will also be held physically and welcome the public, because the magic of our profession is in the shared emotion and experience of audiences gathered in an auditorium that the virtual cannot replace,” says Marie-Laure Barrau, Region Manager for Eclair Theatrical Services, Northern Europe.

“Eclair has been one of our most trusted partners for years. Our procedures are well established, having jointly adapted them over the years. There is real confidence and pleasure in working together on the Festival. The films selected by Artistic Director Lili Hinstin this year make up a program that includes a series of ‘Secret Screenings’ alongside the usual short film competition by Pardi di domani, and two specially designed retrospective sections for this atypical edition, Through the Open Doors and A Journey in the Festival History, a dive into the history of the Festival,” adds Elena Gugliuzza,Image and Sound Coordinator for the Locarno Film Festival.