U.S. photographer and artist Cindy Sherman designed the poster for the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, which was unveiled on Wednesday. It features a character created by Sherman, rendered in stark black and white and wrapped in a yellow leopard-spotted headscarf.

The leopard is the public image of the Locarno fest, which hands out the Golden Leopard as its top prize. Reinterpreting Locarno’s iconic leopard “through her signature language of masquerade and transformation,” Sherman “pays tribute to the festival’s historical image of itself,” the fest said. “A constructed character appears in stark black and white, framed by a billowing leopard‑print scarf rendered in a vivid, blazing yellow, suggesting both glamor and camouflage, revelation and disguise.”

Said Maja Hoffmann, president of the Locarno Film Festival: “Cindy Sherman is one of the most influential artists of our generation. She transformed the way we perceive the world by using the camera not to document reality, but to expose how identity is staged, performed, and shaped by culture.” 

Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro noted: “Sherman’s work asserts the inalienable right to self-expression and to the authorship of one’s own narratives in a moment in which alternative realities have increasingly started to replace the truth. In an age marked by global digital narcissism, the body re-emerges as a central medium through which we redefine both the role of images and our relationship to them. Draped in a leopard-patterned fabric, Sherman’s ecstatic gaze conveys a powerful tension between defiance and beauty – one that transcends the image itself, projecting outward into the world with a dreamlike intensity.”

Locarno 2026 takes place Aug. 5-15. 

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