The list of cinema personalities encountering the public at this year’s festival in Morocco also includes Sean Penn and David Cronenberg, in Marrakech to receive their honorary awards, as well as persecuted Iranian helmer Mohammad Rasoulof, Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako and US director-slash-artist extraordinaire Tim Burton.
Read MoreThe Locarno Film Festival Diaries: ‘Panoptic’, Cinematic Heroes and Dinner with a Diplomatic Legend
It is not often that a film journalist like me gets to experience the stuff hard core news are made of in first person, up close. I mean, I’ve been privy to some great cinematic history in the making and yes, I lived in NYC at the time of the attacks of 9/11 so I watched unmentionable horror unfolding before my very eyes, but in Locarno I feel part of another narrative that will affect the world as we know it.
I’m talking about the sudden decision by UN war crimes Special Prosecutor Carla del Ponte to quit her post, because she feels that Syria is now “a land without future”. Appointed to a three-member panel set up in August 2011 by the Human Rights Council to monitor the al-Assad regime and the unfolding civil war in Syria remotely, del Ponte represented the one slight hope for justice and yet today, that hope seems gone. Having previously sat on tribunals that investigated atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, del Ponte is most famous for putting Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević on trial at The Hague. And for having stood up to Sicily’s La Cosa Nostra and won, by simply walking away with her life. Now that’s a hero of a woman right there!
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