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In what can be touted as a grand feat, Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia has been recruited for jury duty by the Locarno Film Festival. For the unversed, Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light (2024) won the prestigious Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. According to a report by Variety, the Indian filmmaker along with US actor Tim Blake Nelson, Italian actor Luca Marinelli and Belgian producer Diana Elbaum will join Austrian director Jessica Hausner on the jury of the main competition section of the Locarno Film Festival. Austrian director Jessica Hausner will serve as president of the main Jury that awards the Golden Leopard to the filmmakers in the International Competition.
They will decide the winner of the Pardo d'Oro — the Golden Leopard — in the Concorso Internazionale (International Competition) at the 77th edition of the Swiss film festival, which will place from August 7 to 17.
According to the report, the winner of the Swatch First Feature Award will be decided by Moroccan producer-director Khalil Benkirane, Finnish star Alma Pöysti (Fallen Leaves), and Swiss-Italian make-up designer Esmé Sciaroni (La Chimera) while Nigerian filmmaker C.J. “Fiery” Obasi (Juju Stories), French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actor Lina Soualem (Bye Bye Tiberias), and former Cahiers du cinéma editor, scholar and artistic director of the Cannes' Critics Week Charles Tesson will decide the winner of the Filmmakers of the Present section for emerging directors in their first or second feature.
Coming back to Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light, the film had won the Grand Prix award, the second-most prestigious prize of the Cannes festival. All We Imagine As Light, a Malayalam-Hindi feature, tells the story of a nurse named Prabha, who receives an unexpected gift from her long estranged husband that throws her life into disarray.