There
are moments in life when you feel suspended between dream and routine, as if you’ve stepped sideways into a version of reality you didn’t plan but that feels uncannily right. Locarno was exactly that. Ten days of light and shadows, of strangers who became
companions, of stories that carried us far away while we sat still under the night sky.
The
rhythm of the festival is unlike anything else. Mornings often began in a haze of tiredness, but by noon there was always a spark: a conversation that opened a door, a lecture that unsettled assumptions, a casual encounter that made you rethink your own path.
It wasn’t just about watching films — it was about feeling cinema spill into life, asking us to reconsider how we tell our own stories.
Being
there as part of BASECAMP was like holding a mirror to myself. I’m used to thinking of science as something structured, precise, measured. But surrounded by filmmakers and writers, I started noticing the cracks, the overlaps, the moments where knowledge itself
behaves like a narrative. Sometimes it was intimidating — art has its own language, full of freedom and ambiguity — but more often it was liberating. What if science, too, could embrace uncertainty and still remain true?
The
beauty of Locarno wasn’t in the official program alone, but in the spaces in-between. The hurried meals, the lingering coffees, the late-night talks that stretched until dawn. That’s where ideas took shape, not as finished products, but as living things. Somewhere
between exhaustion and exhilaration, I realised that identity isn’t a puzzle to solve but a landscape to explore. You can walk it as a scientist, a storyteller, a comedian, or something else entirely — the terrain shifts with every step.
And
so the festival left me not with answers, but with a different kind of confidence: that it’s fine not to choose a single path, that it’s possible to belong in multiple worlds at once. Cinema reminded me that life itself is never just one genre. It’s a montage
of comedy and drama, of intellectual curiosity and emotional chaos, stitched together by the people we meet along the way.
When
the final night came, there was no grand finale for me — just a quiet certainty. I had lived a story that will stay with me, not because of its scale, but because of how deeply it made me feel at home in my own contradictions.
Elena
I am a PhD researcher in the Khammash Lab at ETH Zürich, where I develop computational frameworks—combining stochastic filtering, mathematical modelling, and machine-learning inference—to reconstruct hidden cellular states from noisy single-cell data. I am planning to extend these methods to challenges like cell-cycle progression and tumour dormancy using spatial transcriptomics and imaging. Creativity is my constant companion: writing equations by day, crafting stand-up jokes by night, devouring books over breakfast, and wandering art exhibitions with coffee in hand. With a pure mathematics background and hands-on biological data experience, I thrive on interdisciplinary collaboration and look forward to sparking art-science projects at LFF 2025.