James Gray and Darren Aronofsky are among the big-name filmmakers getting honored at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival this August. But the 2026 lineup of the Swiss festival also showcases all sorts of newer and emerging filmmakers from around the globe.
Their names may not be widely known yet, but buzz at a festival, such as Locarno, could, of course, open doors and bring support for more projects ahead. Some of these up-and-coming filmmakers, however, create cinematic experiences not under their legal names, but pseudonyms. Cases in point: Filmsaaz and Neozoon, whose works are featured in this year’s Pardi di Domani, or “Leopards of Tomorrow, program.”
The name of the program is a reference to Locarno’s Leopard awards and is designed to provide “a vital space for expressive experimentation and innovative forms of cinematic poetry,” the festival says. In fact, it calls the section “a cornerstone” of its mission “to foster dialogue between generations and traditions and to support the filmmakers who will define the future of cinematic expression.”
Whether or not you are already aware of Neozoon and Filmsaaz and their work, THR has compiled some key info about these filmmakers and asked them about their work as a small tease of what awaits you.
Filmsaaz world-premiered Wolfgang, the minimal-budget feature directorial debut of the Tehran-born audiovisual artist that is a gender-queered acid trip opera, earlier this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In Locarno’s Pardi di Domani – Concorso Corti d’Autore lineup, they will debut a new 21-minute short film called Ãsheghetam.
‘Ãsheghetam’
Courtesy of Locarno Film Festival
The title is “a very intense way to say ‘I love you’,” Filmsaaz explains. “It literally means ‘I am your lover’.” Written, directed and edited by Filmsaaz, whose real name is Saleh Kashefi, the short feels particularly timely. “During a chaotic night at an underground Tehran rave disrupted by the morality police and the sudden outbreak of war, a queer youth chooses to retreat into a bubble of romantic illusion with their partner just to survive the brutal reality outside,” its synopsis reads.
“I started developing the film about a year ago, after the 12-day war between Iran and Israel happened,” Filmsaaz tells THR. “Even though very complex to make, the important thing for me was to finish and release it fast, as it is important for this film to be seen as soon as possible. So we were lucky that Locarno was kind enough to accept the film with a rough cut; the film just [got] finished about two weeks ago.”
Filmsaaz shares this thought on a possible regime change in Iran. “Of course, nothing is permanent, and even the most powerful governments and monarchies have collapsed in history – it’s only a matter of time.” And they add: “These days I feel quite hopeless and cynical in general about the world we live in. The film, in fact, is about giving up hope and dissociating from reality, which is the defense mechanism all of the Iranian youth have learned.”
So, where does the moniker Filmsaaz come from? Well, it is the Farsi word for “filmmaker” but the name also includes some wordplay, because “saaz” also means music in Farsi. “Since I am a musician as well, I chose this name,” the creative explains. This new name was also a conscious decision. “I wanted to let go of the conventional birth name, which represents a culture, a gender, a religion, a history, and represents a family,” they told THR earlier this year. “I wanted to give myself a name that was as simple as possible. I wanted to free myself from all those contexts and layers, and also to somehow redefine how filmmakers are represented.”
Filmsaaz, courtesy of Seraphine Sallin-Mason
After all, the likes of Bono and Prince prove you can make a name for yourself with just one name. “Why are we always known by our first name and last name?” explained Filmsaaz. “Musicians and other kinds of artists can have artistic names. They can have a persona.”
Filmsaaz has made all sorts of shorts in the past, and they have such colorful titles as The Three Letter Word (2017), Kim Kardashian in a Cat’s Eyes (2019), I Was Gonna Kill Myself but Instead I Made This Film (2020), Leaving Here and Her (2021), And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil (2023), A Man Passes by the Soaked Trees (2024) and Overture (2025).
Meanwhile, Locarno 2026‘s Pardi di Domani – Concorso Internazionale lineup includes Together, a 14-minute short that the festival website teases this way: “An exploration of human desires for land ownership and property through archival footage and social media. It contrasts togetherness with rising individualism, questioning whether possession stems from need or a Eurocentric, patriarchal narrative.”
The short comes from the “eco feminist art collective” Neozoon. The two main creatives behind it are Friederike Kersten and Michaela Metzger, who have also worked with other collaborators in the past. The Locarno website notes that Neozoon was founded in 2009 in Berlin and Paris. And it highlights: “Their work is based on the principle of collage and investigates sociological questions of the Anthropocene,” or our epoch in which human activity shapes the planet’s climate and ecosystems. The collective’s website is even more specific, saying the team “examines sociological questions dealing with speciesism in the capitalocene.”
Neozoon, aka Michaela Metzger (left) and Friederike Kersten (right), courtesy of Locarno Film Festival
You may know that “neozoon” is the word for a non-native or invasive species. And the collective’s street art, films and installations have used the concept of non-native species to explore how modern human society interacts with nature and animals. “In their video films, the de-and recontextualization of found footage and social media material is a recurring element,” especially the use of YouTube and TikTok footage, the Locarno website also explains.
And the Locarno site highlights some of their past works. Again, they have titles that will turn heads. Among them are Good Boy – Bad Boy (2011), Unboxing Eden (2013), Shake Shake Shake (2016), Little Lower Than the Angels (2019), Biting the Dust (2021) and Lake of Fire (2022).
If you get a sense that there is an activist vibe and a desire to challenge our thinking behind Neozoon’s work, that is surely by design. For example, Lake of Fire is described as “a film collage that addresses the fear of death and hell and how a dualistic way of seeing and living fuels the climate change-related ‘hell on earth’.”
The inspiration for Together came in the form of a 2021 book by an anthropologist and an archaeologist. “After reading [David] Graeber and [David] Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything a few years ago, we started looking specifically for film and audio material about ‘the history of mankind,’ the Neozoon duo tells THR. “The same story came up again and again: people settling down, claiming ownership, fencing themselves off, becoming more and more individual, more and more alone – as if that were the great goal of humankind and as if there had never been another option. So we started asking what kind of story that actually is.”
‘Together’
Courtesy of Locarno Film Festival
Neozoon also has a clear take on how Eurocentric, patriarchal narratives play into this urge to own land and fulfill individuals’ desires. “All the material we found comes from the global North, produced by a small number of institutions,” the Neozoon members explain. “What those films narrate as human development is a story of acquisition: settling down, putting up fences, owning. They weren’t inventing it. They were illustrating the science of their time, and that science was done by the same people. European men excavated and European men interpreted, and the past they found looked like the world they already lived in: the hunter at the center, the woman at the fire.”
Things are starting to change, though. “Much of that is being rewritten now – the abilities of early humans, who actually hunted, the role of women completely – not because new evidence appeared, but because other people are doing the interpreting now,” highlights the Neozoon team.
So, does the collective consider itself political and/or activist? “Political, yes. Activist would be claiming more than a short film can do,” the duo tells THR. “What runs through all our films is the question of the exploitative treatment of non-human animals and of nature by (male) human beings. New research suggests that this world was once a different one, in which ecofeminist perspectives, for instance, were the standard rather than the exception. Part of that is observing and acknowledging other species on this planet.”
Such as ants, for example, which play a key role in Together. They are “masters of bridge-building in order to survive as a group,” Neozoon explains. “That seems to us more admirable than the story we have been telling ourselves about our own species.”
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