“I’m always shocked when an actor says they want to work with me,” filmmaker James Gray told a Sunday press conference at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Shocked, or surprised, was also the reaction in the room. After all, the U.S. auteur is in town to receive the Career Leopard honor at the Swiss festival.

“Actors dictate the style of the film much more than I think is talked about,” Gray also shared when asked about how he works with performers. “I just try to make sure that they are totally comfortable to be excellent. I have no acting talent. I’m not a good director of actors. It is all about how good they are and letting them have the freedom to be themselves in the scene and to listen to each other.”

Does he write films with specific actors in mind? “I try to write the movie not with actors in mind because you’re always going to be disappointed,” Gray offered. “You write it for some actor, and then you find out that guy is not available for two years, and then they can’t do it. And then, instead of the 6’2″ guy, you have to cast the 5’1″ guy and rethink it. So I’ve learned never to do that.”

Asked about Italian and other film history, Gray on Sunday told the press: “If I had to pick cinema 1945 to 1980, I would say Italian cinema is everything to me, and I’m not just saying this to play for your sense of self, but it’s absolutely true. The number of Italian directors in that period is an ocean of brilliance – it’s unparalleled.”

And the filmmaker shared: “To me, movies are the most beautiful art form because it’s the closest thing we have to a dream.”

That also affects how he approaches his own cinematic creations. “I try to show you a version of my own dream, my intimacy,” Gray explained. “It’s why people say, ‘I hate that movie’ or ‘I love that movie.’ … That’s why when somebody talks behind you in the movie theater, you want to kill them. It’s something interrupting your dream.”

Luca Guadagnino didn’t come to Switzerland to share updates on the drama surrounding his OpenAI movie, Artificial, during a meeting with reporters at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. No, he was in town to sing the praises of a protégé.

To be precise, Guadagnino came to Locarno, in Italian-speaking Switzerland, to discuss Ketticè, the sophomore feature of his former assistant, writer-director Giovanni Tortorici (Diciannove). The coming-of-age drama stars Salvatore Gallina, Rachele Testagrossa and Monica Bellucci. And yes, the movie’s list of producers includes Guadagnino.

Set in Palermo, Sicily in 2012, the era of media mogul-turned-politician Silvio Berlusconi, the movie revolves around Giulio, a listless and dissatisfied 16-year-old who drifts through his days without any enthusiasm for school and no real future prospects. But his encounter with Ketty, a more self-assured peer, offers him an escape from the monotony. The two form a close friendship, which a synopsis describes as “a shared refuge in their search for freedom, far from the judgmental gaze of the adult world.”

The film’s title refers to Ketty’s nickname in the Sicilian dialect. Bellucci plays Giulio’s mother in an aristocratic Sicilian family that leaves her feeling oppressed. The cinematography is by Camilla Cattabriga, with editing by Marco Costa. PiperPlay is handling international sales.

Guadagnino was asked by reporters about Italy’s rich cinematic history and if his decision to produce Tortorici’s movie was his way of keeping that tradition alive. “Most definitely,” he replied. “I think that we can agree that historically, Italian cinema, from the silent times until the ’70s, generated some of the most important personalities in the history of cinema, but also as an industry, had created a system that was the envy of many other countries. There were many different kind of films being made.”

But then, something happened with “the advent of private TV and the Berlusconi empire,” Guadagnino offered. “It dried [up], and most of what was produced for cinema became TV. Genre was killed. A pretension on authorship became such that the great idea of cinema as authorship became basically people writing scripts and shooting their own scripts so that they could define themselves as authors.” In the end, “the movie industry shrunk and the perspective shrunk and the cinema of Italy became sterile and totally devoid of an idea of language and of an idea of life.”

That’s where Tortorici comes in. “So when you meet a personality like Giovanni, who, of course, is an Italian filmmaker working in Italy, but I like to think that he’s a filmmaker, period, when you meet someone that is a complete rarity in the landscape of Italian cinema, you must protect it,” Guadagnino concluded. “You must make sure that every stone is not left unturned in order to give him the means to express himself. For me, introducing films such as Giovanni’s movies is a way to … set up a pavement into the future.”

And he emphasized: “It’s about the mindset. The mindset means how you do your stuff, what stories you want to tell, how you understand reality, how you interpret reality. How you run away from falseness is intoxicating for all its truth, all its incredible, vivid reality.”

As a producer, Guadagnino shared that he likes to watch a movie and experience it like anyone else in a movie theater. His audience take on Ketticè: “As an audience member, I feel the movie really speaks in a very universal way.”

Tortorici said his film explores how institutions, such as school, family and the state, fail kids. “I think the guilty ones are the adults,” he told reporters. “I think they just live in a cultural context of the ultra-capitalist contest and a mediatic world.”

Does Tortorici have any vision for his cinematic future after two autobiographically inspired films? “In my next movie, I’m going to explore something that is very far from me,” he offered. “Shooting this movie, I met a lot of people in Palermo, even coming from difficult neighborhoods with difficult life experiences. I find in these stories the possibility to continuing to explore this struggle of young people with authorities.”

Continued Tortorici: “I think the big problem of society is the structure of, for example, the family. I think family is the structure that [creates] the next repressed person. So I would very much like to explore these different experiences in all parts of society, family in particular.”

Writer-director Natalka Vorozhbyt (Bad Roads) decided to face the Demons to explore the roots of the war between Russia and Ukraine. Now, she is unleashing the Demons at the 79^th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, where the film will world-premiere in the Filmmakers of the Present competition program on Aug. 13.

Here is how a synopsis describes the movie: “In the 1990s, Slavik, a homeless drifter from Russia with a blurred past who claims to be a writer, wanders into a remote village in central Ukraine. Nina, a strong and independent woman much older than Slavik, takes the stranger into her home. At first, their strange companionship resembles an unlikely love story. But as their relationship unfolds, love turns into betrayal, and the village begins to reveal its hidden rules — a place where witches may live next door, and the dead sometimes speak with the living.”

The creator of the film highlights that it unfolds on three interconnected levels. “The first is the relationship between a man and a woman within a traditional society,” Vorozhbyt explains in a director’s statement. “The second is socio-political, where this relationship becomes a metaphor for the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. The third is mystical, exploring the connection between the living, the dead, and the otherworld.”

In case you wonder: Nina seems to be the embodiment of post-Soviet Ukraine and the country’s independence. So, you’ll want to look out for any danger to her.

Ruslana Pysanka, Aleksey Mitin, Tatiana Stepanova, Ruslan Garmash and Mykola Ponomarenko feature in the cast. Demons was filmed by cinematographer Volodymyr Ivanov, with editing by Milenia Fiedler and Andriy Gulyanych. Celluloid Dreams is handling international sales.

THR can now exclusively premiere the trailer for Demons. Don’t expect any exorcizing of demons here! Instead, it is time for a drink and “fire in the belly.” You look confused! To change that, watch the trailer for Demons right here.