Locarno's Three Films Sort Audiences While Calling It Elusiveness

Locarno 2026 programmed three films that refuse to settle into legibility, including Objet A, Tear Gas, and Fire Flower (Hanabi).

The festival's own language called them "elusive." Nobody asked why elusiveness was the thing being celebrated, or who got richer by insisting on it.

Three formally demanding works landed in the official selection of a major European festival. Apparently challenging to interpret, resistant to plot summary, uninterested in clarity. The critical response treated this as neutral documentation, as if the curator's job were simply to report the films that exist, not to choose them from thousands of competing claims on attention and legitimacy.

But festivals do not work that way, and we know this. Locarno's selection is an act of consecration. By programming these particular films, Locarno purchases something it cannot buy with money: distance from commercial circuits, the right to claim "curation" instead of mere screening. The appearance of intellectual seriousness. And it does all this while maintaining a crucial fiction, one that cannot survive explicit articulation. The fiction is the following. The difficulty is not a filter, the elusiveness is not a barrier. The resistance to accessible form is not working as a sorting mechanism that divides the audience into those with cultural permission to like it and those without.

Because if anyone said that aloud, the whole enterprise would crack. You cannot openly exclude people and call yourself a festival of cinema. You can only program works so formally severe that accessibility itself becomes impossible, then use the word "elusive" to describe what is actually gatekeeping dressed up as aesthetics. Bourdieu called this symbolic violence, and he meant precisely this. It is the power to make hierarchy feel like inevitability. The festival does not say you are not sophisticated enough to understand Objet A. It says the film is elusive, which means your confusion is not your failure but the film's intention. The mechanism that sorts people works so smoothly precisely because nobody acknowledges it is sorting at all.

Watch for this pattern everywhere. Whenever someone is defending difficulty by calling it "complexity," ask what work that difficulty is actually doing. Who keeps the passport to this particular club? What would it cost the gatekeeper to admit everyone in?