It is sometimes dazzling how festivals synchronise on opposite sides of the world. At Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, which runs at roughly the same time as the Melbourne International Film Festival, one of the most popular films was Lucky - starring a 91-year-old Harry Dean Stanton as a version of himself.

Last week, Locarno was gearing up for repeat screenings of the film; MIFF too has an encore screening on Friday.

A first film by John Carroll Lynch, himself a noted character actor, Lucky also stars a much more famous director - David Lynch - as Harry Dean's bar-room buddy Howard, who is lamenting the loss of his 100-year-old tortoise, Roosevelt.

"[Lucky] is looking at mortality probably not for the first time, but the last time," Carroll Lynch says. "He's in penalty time and he doesn't know when the ref is gonna call it. This film doesn't say the smell of death is rancid - sometimes it's sweet. It's a movie about living."

Locarno Film Festival, wedged between Cannes in May and Venice in September, has defined itself under current director Carlo Chatrian as "a festival of discovery". Almost all the films screened are unknown quantities, with just a few crowd-pleasers given the royal treatment at nightly outdoor screenings on a huge screen in the town square.

That's where audiences 8000-strong watch Charlize Theron deliver huge punches in Atomic Blonde or experience super-sized heart-wrenching in the opening night film Tomorrow and Thereafter, a semi-autobiographical account by French actor-director Noemie Lvovsky about life as the child of a beloved mother with severe psychological problems.

The festival otherwise emphasises the new and unknown - or in the case of the excellent retrospectives, often the old and overlooked.

This year's major retrospective showed 33 features and a collection of shorts by Jacques Tourneur - a French director who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and who made the original Cat People and such B-movie classics as I Walked with a Zombie.

A smaller retrospective devoted to actor Nastassja Kinski showed Paul Schrader's 1981 remake of Cat People, a beguiling film in its own right but a sprawl of ideas compared with the smoothly engineered original.

As for the "discoveries", the top award, the Golden Leopard, went to Wang Bing for Mrs Fang, a documentary about a woman with Alzheimer's living in a hospice, who is sent home to her village to die.

Wang is not new to the festival circuit, but his inclination towards the relentlessly challenging means only a few critics know his work. The Leopard should change that.

Although it didn't win a prize, one of the festival's biggest hits wasn't anticipated: Wajid, the third feature from Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir, in which an adult son working as an architect overseas comes back to Palestine to help with his sister's wedding, plunging him back into a longstanding friction with his father.

Lucky screens at 4pm, August 18, at the Comedy Theatre as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival. The Age is a festival partner.

miff.com.au