Can Locarno’s industry prizes open European doors for emerging African and Latin American films?

Locarno Pro awarded top prizes to A Vineyard for a Lobster, Accept My Plea for Burial, Spring Story and Yazz in Locarno, Switzerland, on 9 and 10 August, as the festival’s industry programme connected emerging African, Latin American and European filmmakers with the co-production networks that include Belgian professionals and EU-backed cultural institutions. Belgium had no project among the four headline winners, but Belgian director Fabrice du Welz’s role as president of the festival’s main competition jury underlined the country’s wider presence at the 79th Locarno Film Festival.

For Belgium-based producers, distributors and festival programmers, the results offer an early map of films that may enter European development, sales and festival circuits. That matters in a country where screen agencies, including the Flanders Audiovisual Fund and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation’s Centre du Cinéma, routinely work through international co-production. Neither fund, nor Belgium’s culture ministers, had issued a specific response to these industry awards by publication time.

The two Open Doors winners carry the clearest development stakes. Ugandan director Talemwa Pius and producer Gashumba Emmanuel brought A Vineyard for a Lobster, a fiction project in which snow unexpectedly falls on an equatorial village and a British delegation seeks access to the phenomenon. Screen International described the premise as a confrontation with colonial legacies, while Emmanuel identified the unusual snowfall as a practical production challenge requiring effects and international collaboration.

Accept My Plea for Burial, from Somali-American director Mohammed Sheikh and producer Kadir Harbi Hassan, follows a mother who refuses to bury her 12-year-old son until the disputed circumstances of his death are addressed. According to Screen International, the project already had support from the Doha Film Institute and Aflamuna Connection before arriving in Locarno. Its conflict between customary law, religious counsel and accountability gives the film a specific Somali setting while raising questions that can travel across borders.

Both projects emerged from the second year of Open Doors’ four-year focus on 42 African countries. Locarno describes Open Doors as a platform for filmmakers from communities with limited resources or where artistic expression is at risk. Cineuropa reported that the 2026 cohort initially comprised six projects, six producers and five directors from across Africa, supported through mentoring, meetings and financial or in-kind awards.

That framing differs from a conventional festival report centred on prestige. Open Doors head Zsuzsi Bánkuti has argued that cinema’s future depends on who is able to make films and under what conditions. The European Commission’s Creative Europe MEDIA programme expresses a related but more market-oriented objective: it says public support should combine cultural diversity with a more competitive European audiovisual industry. Belgium’s Creative Europe desks in Flanders and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation are the local points of entry into that EU system, although there is no evidence that they financed these four projects directly.

Elsewhere in Locarno Pro, Spring Story, directed by Gabriela Guillermo and Irina Raffo, was recognised from First Look’s Uruguayan work-in-progress selection. The film follows an encounter in Montevideo that develops into a relationship stretched between Uruguay and Venice. Uruguay’s audiovisual agency, ACAU, presented First Look less as corrective inclusion than as a strategic opportunity to strengthen the international position of Uruguayan production.

Yazz came through Alliance 4 Development, Locarno’s programme for projects from Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. Florian Hoffmann’s project, produced across Switzerland, Germany and France, concerns a 16-year-old daughter of international UN staff growing up in the Central African Republic. Swiss producer tellfilm said the programme offered the team pitching and individual meetings with international professionals.

The awards do not guarantee that any of the films will be completed or distributed in Belgium. They provide leverage: money, services, visibility and introductions that can close financing gaps. The next test is whether the winning teams secure co-producers, sales agents and production schedules, and whether European partners allow the filmmakers to retain creative authority over stories rooted outside Europe.