Eclair Theatrical Services, a leading European player in mastering and digital & physical distribution services to cinemas, is proud to be, for the fifteenth consecutive year, 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.
About Eclair Theatrical Services
The new Eclair Theatrical Services entity provides mastering, QC, content distribution services to cinema operators, in 19 countries from its offices in Barcelona, ??Liège-Barchon, Berlin, London, New York, Paris-Vanves, and Vicenza. At the request of distributors, agents, sales managers and rights holders, Eclair Theatrical Services masters DCPs, manages KDMs and distributes all types of content to cinemas in Europe, North America and Australasia through its own global solutions and its network of +3800 connected cinemas.
About the Locarno Film Festival
Throughout its 73-years of history, the Locarno Film Festival has occupied a unique position in the landscape of major film festivals. Every year in August, the small Swiss-Italian town of Locarno, located in the heart of Europe, becomes for eleven days the world capital of auteur cinema. Thousands of film lovers and industry professionals meet there to satisfy and share their passion for cinema in all its diversity. Having acknowledged that it is impossible to hold the physical event in its usual form, because of the health crisis, in 2020 the Festival, in 2020 the Festival reinvents itself, launching Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films, an initiative to foster independent auteur filmmaking.