Perhaps because we mostly associate her with British period dramas, it's surprising to see in person that Emma Thompson is one of the funniest stars on the scene today. In the conversation she shared with the audience this Saturday on the occasion of receiving the Leopard Club Award from the Locarno Film Festival, she recalled her beginnings in the world of comedy. "When I was young, I didn't want to be an actress like my mother (Phyllida Law) because it seemed like a very precarious job. But I became a comedian. I did stand-up comedy at political demonstrations, full of jokes about Margaret Thatcher. And about herpes. It was a bit of a fluke to get work as an actress. I hadn't sought it out, and sometimes what turns out best is exactly what you don't look for," she says.

Why so much expectation before the world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival of Mektoub, my love: Canto dueA decade ago, Mektoub, my love It was to be the great project of Abdellatif Kechiche, then the French director with the greatest impact thanks to the success of Blue is the Warmest Color, Palme d'Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. The filmmaker set out to adapt La blessure la vraie by François Bégaudeau (co-writer and star of another Palme d'Or, The class by Laurent Cantet), an autobiographical novel about a teenager's sexual awakening over the course of a summer in the 1980s. Kechiche moved the action to Seta in the 1990s and focused on a film student, Amin (Shain Boumédine), who returns from Paris to his hometown to enjoy a vacation with his gang. What was supposed to be a standalone film begins to look like a saga whose complexity frightens the producers. Lacking financing, Kechiche sells the Palme d'Or to finish the first installment. Soaked in the Occitan sun, shaken by the sensual hedonism of youth and with the salty taste of summers spent at the beach, Mektoub, my love: Canto one (2017) stands as a hymn to the Mediterranean as a way of understanding life and the experience of time.