Isabella Rossellini Emotional at Locarno Opening Night

LOCARNO, Switzerland - Isabella Rossellini fought back tears as she stepped onto the Locarno Film Festival’s opening-night stage, the weight of three generations of cinematic history settling squarely on her shoulders. The 74-year-old actress, director, and model received the festival’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award on Wednesday, an honor she framed not as a personal triumph but as a tribute to the family name that paved her way.

“I am not the star tonight,” Rossellini told the packed Piazza Grande audience, her voice catching. “My mother was the star. My father was the star. I am simply the one who gets to carry their flashlight a little further down the road.”

The moment marked a full-circle homecoming for Rossellini, whose father, Roberto Rossellini, helped define Italian neorealism with films that premiered in the very country she now calls home. Her mother, Ingrid Bergman, won three Academy Awards and became one of Hollywood’s most luminous exports, but it was her parents’ scandalous love affair - she left her first husband for the married director - that made them tabloid fixtures long before Rossellini was born in 1952. That legacy, she said, has always been both a gift and a burden.

“People see the name and they expect something,” Rossellini said, composing herself with a slow breath. “But my parents gave me something better than expectation. They gave me curiosity. They showed me that a life in cinema is not about being perfect. It is about being brave enough to fail.”

The evening’s program included a montage of Rossellini’s own career, which has been anything but conventional. She began as a model in the 1980s, became the face of Lancôme, and then pivoted to acting in films like Blue Velvet and Death Becomes Her. In recent years, she has reinvented herself again as a documentarian and ethologist, studying animal behavior with the same intensity she once brought to red carpets.

Locarno’s artistic director, who introduced Rossellini with a speech about “cinema as inheritance, not just art,” noted that the festival had long wanted to honor her but had waited until the moment felt right. That moment, he said, arrived with her latest project - a documentary about her father’s post-war films that she has been developing for nearly a decade. Rossellini confirmed the project is in its final editing stages.

“I was always afraid of touching my father’s work,” she admitted. “I thought, ‘Who am I to interpret it?’ But then I realized that is exactly what a daughter should do. To look at what he made and ask, ‘What does this mean now?’ That is not disrespect. That is continuation.”

The crowd, which included several European filmmakers and a smattering of Hollywood executives, gave Rossellini a standing ovation that lasted more than four minutes. She appeared genuinely moved by the reception, pressing a hand to her chest and mouthing “thank you” repeatedly. At one point, she looked up at the night sky, as if searching for her mother.

“Ingrid used to say that acting was about listening,” Rossellini said, her eyes glistening. “My father used to say that directing was about watching. I am still trying to learn how to do both. Perhaps that is why I keep working.”

Rossellini also spoke about the changing nature of fame, contrasting her parents’ era with today’s celebrity culture. She noted that her mother was once vilified by the press for her personal choices, and that social media has made such scrutiny even more relentless. But she refused to romanticize the past.

“I do not miss the old days,” she said plainly. “The old days had their own cruelties. But I do miss the idea that an artist could make a mistake and be allowed to grow from it. That seems harder now.”

The opening-night ceremony also included the premiere of a newly restored print of Stromboli, the 1950 film that Roberto Rossellini directed with Bergman, and which was shot on a volcanic island off Sicily. Isabella Rossellini introduced the screening with a personal anecdote, recalling how her parents would argue passionately about the film’s ending for years afterward.

“They fought about art the way other couples fight about money,” she said with a smile. “My mother thought the final shot should be of the volcano. My father insisted it should be of Ingrid’s face. Neither would ever concede. I think they were both right.”

Locarno’s Lifetime Achievement Award is the latest in a string of honors for Rossellini, who has previously been recognized at Cannes and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But she signaled that this particular tribute carries unique weight because it happens in the Swiss-Italian town where her father once screened his early documentaries.

“I walked through the old streets today, and I could almost hear his footsteps,” she said. “He was here before I was born. He was here when this festival was just a small gathering of people who loved cinema. To stand here tonight, with all of you, feels like I am closing a circle that I never even knew was open.”

As the ceremony wound down, Rossellini embraced a trio of young filmmakers who had been invited to the stage to meet her. She whispered something to each of them, and all three smiled. When asked later what she had told them, Rossellini laughed.

“I told them the same thing my mother told me when I was starting out,” she said. “Have a good story. And don’t forget to eat.”

Source: Hollywood Reporter