Locarno Film Festival

Celebrating its 63rd edition, Olivier Pere, in his first year as artistic director, continued the radical tradition with this year's bizarre selection - 20 first films, 40 world premieres and a strand of past glories. In the running for the Golden Leopard were also three 18-certificate movies.

In Bruce La Bruce's LA Zombie a naked man emerges from the sea. Is he an alien zombie or a schizophrenic homeless person suffering from delusion? Like a dark saviour, he roams Los Angeles in search of dead men who, with sex, he brings back to life - extremely controversial, funny and difficult to watch.

Another provocative vision is Bas-Fonds by French director Isild Le Besco, in which three women live a life without limits (inset picture). Jean Genet would love this movie - dirty and poetic, erotic and angelic, realistic and manic. Le Besco's showcase is of a body that fights against itself and the world.

Out of the hat jumped Article 12 - Waking up in a Surveillance Society - a striking documentary from young Argentinian director Juan Manuel Bianin. The film adopts the 12th article of the universal declaration of Human a to assess privacy issues worldwide. It brings together the world's leading academics, cultural figures and technologists to highlight the devastating potency of surveillance, and presents a growing movement fighting for the preservation of this crucial right.

Who really wants to control people? Does all this control make us a safer society? It is an angry polemical movie that exposes the arguments for invasions of privacy as pretexts for big corporations to monitor consumer behaviour. We learn that some of the information finds its way to the military and is used to improve their recruitment strategies.

The festival featured a tribute to young Italian director Corso Salani, who died last June at the age of 42 - too young. As one of Locarno's discoveries, Salani has left a legacy of amazing, rarely seen masterpieces.

Salani worked experimentally and, of course, with no money combining poetic cinema with social issues. Locarno chose to show again Gli Occhi Stanchi - Tired Eyes - a movie from 1997 about a Polish girl returning home. She gets a lift with a film crew who decide to make a documentary of her story and discover a victim of prostitution, violence, exploitation and abuses of all kinds.

Locarno Film Festival is most well-known for its open-air cinema The Piazza Grande - one of the biggest in the world with a capacity of 8,000 people. A mixture of local people, cinema-goers and journalists watching movies, even if in the rain - an emotional, if damp, experience - that brings out all the magic of cinema. One of the delights on show was a new Russian animated version of Hans Christian Andersen's Ugly Duckling.

It was also hard to resist the temptation to revisit some golden oldies, such as a retrospective devoted to the genius of the prince of comedy and pleasure of intelligence Ernst Lubitsch.

Locarno Film Festival is rethinking culture to find a true image of what has been lost and once loved, a cinematic idea of the world, giving meaning to the present and rebuilding the future.

It is a paradox to have this festival here in Switzerland - a rich country, in the middle of Europe that will probably never join Europe because it has too many dodgy businesses to hide, with the best banks in the world that make it the best place to launder money. But there are no movies about that, yet.