Isabella Rossellini Emotional at Locarno Tribute

LOCARNO, Switzerland - Isabella Rossellini wiped away tears as she stepped onto the Locarno Film Festival’s opening-night stage, the weight of a storied cinematic family settling visibly on her shoulders. The 74-year-old actress, director and model was honored with the festival’s prestigious career achievement award, a moment she framed not as a personal triumph but as a continuation of a lineage that shaped modern cinema.

Rossellini, daughter of Swedish screen legend Ingrid Bergman and Italian neorealist master Roberto Rossellini, addressed the packed Piazza Grande with a voice that cracked with emotion. She spoke of her parents as "ghosts in the best sense," collaborators in a legacy she never expected to carry. The crowd, which had gathered under a warm Swiss summer sky, responded with a sustained standing ovation that left Rossellini visibly overwhelmed.

The award, Locarno’s highest honor for lifetime achievement, arrives as Rossellini enjoys a late-career renaissance. Her recent turn in David Lynch’s "Inland Empire" revival and her acclaimed one-woman stage show about her mother have reintroduced her to a new generation of filmgoers. But at Locarno, the focus was squarely on heritage - and the complicated gift of bearing a famous name.

"I never wanted to be an actress," Rossellini told the audience, her tone shifting between laughter and tears. "I wanted to be a zoologist. But life had other plans, and the plans came with my mother’s face and my father’s vision. You don't choose that. You only learn to live with it."

She paused, steadying herself against a podium adorned with white flowers, a subtle nod to the minimalist elegance often associated with her mother’s era. Rossellini then recounted her first memory of film: sitting on her father’s lap at a dubbing studio while he worked on a post-war masterpiece. She recalled the scratchy sound of reel-to-reel tape, the smell of cigarette smoke and coffee, and the sight of her father’s hands gesturing wildly at a screen she could barely see.

That early exposure never left her. Despite building a career as a fashion icon for Lancôme and a muse for Lynch and directors like Vincente Minnelli, Rossellini has always circled back to the intellectual rigor of her father’s work. She noted that Roberto Rossellini’s films - "Rome, Open City," "Germany Year Zero" - were not just stories but moral documents, attempts to understand a fractured world.

"I think I am crying because I finally understand," she said. "He was not making cinema. He was making a record of humanity. And to be honored here, in this place that values cinema as art, not commerce - it feels like I’m finally carrying the message forward."

Locarno has long been a festival that prizes auteur-driven work, and its choice to honor Rossellini this year carries symbolic weight. The festival’s artistic director has emphasized a program that connects past and present, and Rossellini embodies that bridge. Her own directorial efforts, including the 2011 short "Chez moi," have riffed on themes of identity and displacement that echo her father’s preoccupations.

But the night was not solely elegiac. Rossellini, ever the showwoman, injected doses of wit into her remarks. She joked about her mother’s infamous scandal - leaving her first husband for Rossellini’s father - and how it taught her early that "passion always wins over propriety." She also thanked the festival’s younger programmers for treating her not as a monument but as a working artist.

"Young people here ask me questions about my father’s films like they’re discovering them for the first time," she said. "That is the miracle. The films are older than I am, but they still feel urgent. They still feel like today."

The evening included a montage of her career, spanning from her breakthrough role in Lynch’s "Blue Velvet" (1986) to her recent voice work in animated features. But the most resonant clips, by the audience’s reaction, were silent home-movie footage showing a young Isabella at the beach with her parents, chasing seagulls, laughing.

Rossellini concluded her acceptance speech with a toast to the festival, raising a glass of local Swiss wine and offering a line she attributed to her mother: "The only way to survive in this business is to love the work more than you fear the failure." She left the stage to a second standing ovation, pausing at the wings to blow a kiss toward the giant screen that still flickered with images of her parents.

The Locarno Film Festival runs through mid-August, with a program that includes new films by established auteurs and debut features from emerging voices. But for many in attendance, the opening night will belong to Rossellini - a woman who spent decades in the shadows of giants, only to emerge as the one illuminating their memory.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter