Locarno Pro Passes 2,000 Accreditations for the First Time: 2,140 Delegates, 1,463 Meetings, and Why Mid Summer Is Becoming Central

The numbers

Locarno Pro closed its largest edition to date. The 2026 industry programme registered 2,140 delegates, up 10% from 1,940 in 2025, passing 2,000 accreditations for the first time. Nearly 100 countries were represented.

Match Me!, Alliance 4 Development and Open Doors together generated 1,463 pre-scheduled meetings. Across Industry Screenings, First Look, the SWISS FILMS and Spanish previews and Heritage Monday, 78 titles were presented.

Why a 10% increase is more interesting than it sounds

Industry accreditation figures are usually promotional material, and it is fair to be sceptical of them. The reason this one is worth reading is what it says about the shape of the calendar.

The film market year has historically had two centres of gravity: Berlin and Cannes in the first half, and the autumn run of Venice, Toronto and the American Film Market in the second. Everything else was secondary, and the mid summer period was a gap.

A mid August industry programme growing 10% and crossing 2,000 delegates suggests the gap is filling. That happens for structural reasons rather than because a festival got better at marketing.

The most likely reason is that the market has more transactions to conduct and fewer places to conduct them efficiently. Cannes is expensive, crowded, and increasingly dominated by the largest players. Toronto is compressed by its overlap with Venice. A mid summer window with 2,000 people and 1,463 pre-scheduled meetings offers something the major markets have made harder: the ability to actually meet people.

What 1,463 pre-scheduled meetings tells you

That number is the useful one, more than the delegate count.

Pre-scheduled meetings are a measure of intent. A delegate might attend for the screenings or the setting. A pre-scheduled meeting means two parties agreed in advance that there was business to do.

At 2,140 delegates and 1,463 meetings, the ratio indicates a working market rather than a networking event. It also indicates that the matching infrastructure, meaning Match Me! and the associated programmes, is functioning as a deal origination mechanism rather than a soft introduction service.

For a smaller sales agent or producer, that structure is genuinely more useful than the equivalent time at a larger market, where meetings compete against premieres, parties and the gravitational pull of the biggest titles.

The Occhipinti point deserves attention

Andrea Occhipinti, who founded the Italian distributor Lucky Red, made a comment at Locarno Pro that is worth recording, because it runs against the prevailing mood.

He cited acquisitions including Ida, Moonlight and Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Return as examples where emotion, political urgency and accumulated taste outweighed discouraging market signals.

The argument, put plainly, is that the titles that justified specialty distribution as a business were ones the data did not support at the point of acquisition. Moonlight is the strongest case. On paper, at the moment of purchase, it was a difficult sell.

This is a real tension in the current market and it is worth stating honestly rather than resolving glibly.

Where we would agree and disagree with him

We would agree that performance data cannot identify the outlier. A model built on comparables will systematically undervalue the title that has no comparable, which is precisely the title that occasionally transforms a distributor's year.

We would disagree that this makes data unhelpful. The distributors who can afford a Moonlight are the ones whose other seventy acquisitions were priced correctly. Taste buys the outlier. Discipline funds it.

The failure mode in specialty distribution has rarely been insufficient taste. It has been paying too much for the reasonable titles, which leaves no capacity to be wrong on the exceptional one. A distributor who knows precisely what their catalogue earns, by title, by window and by territory, has more room to make an unjustifiable bet, not less.

That is the productive way to hold both ideas: use data to price the predictable, and preserve the freedom to ignore it on the rare occasion that matters.

Heritage Monday, again

Among the 78 titles presented, the Heritage Monday strand is the one we would flag for library owners.

Restored and catalogue titles are one of the few dedicated categories on the festival industry calendar, and the buyer demand is real: free ad supported channels need volume, specialty streamers need curation, and repertory theatrical has been resurgent.

The constraint on the supply side is almost never appetite. It is that most library owners cannot quickly establish what they hold, what condition the materials are in, which rights are unencumbered, and which titles would justify a restoration. A dedicated market strand exists and is under used, because the sellers cannot answer the buyers' first question.

What to take from a small statistic

A 10% increase in accreditations at a mid summer industry programme is not, by itself, important.

What it indicates is that the market is redistributing away from a small number of very large, very expensive events toward a wider calendar of workable ones. For independent sellers, that redistribution is favourable. Access at Cannes is expensive and contested. Access at Locarno is neither, and 1,463 pre-scheduled meetings suggests the business is genuinely being done there.