THE YELLOW LEOPARD
Each year, the Locarno Film Festival invites designers to submit poster proposals for its annual edition. For the 74th, we took the invitation seriously. Locarno is one of the oldest and most distinguished film festivals in the world — eleven days each August when a small Swiss-Italian town at the edge of Lake Maggiore becomes the international capital of auteur cinema. A brief worth researching properly.
The lake had always looked like a leopard.
Nobody had drawn it that way yet.
The festival's emblem is the Golden Leopard — Pardo d'oro — awarded each year to the best film in competition. It is both a trophy and an icon, the single image most associated with Locarno in the minds of anyone who knows it. What research revealed was something more unexpected. The shoreline of Lake Maggiore, which embraces the town of Locarno on three sides, traces a silhouette that is unmistakably feline.
The poster places the leopard where it has always lived — stretched across the geography of its own city, superimposed on a cartographic rendering of the lake and its surroundings. The map is not decoration. It is the leopard's body. The yellow is the Pardo gold. The composition makes visible something that was always true about Locarno: that the festival and the landscape it inhabits share the same animal.
Three colours.
One icon.
A city that was already its own poster.
