Running a high-profile arts festival – especially one affected by political and budgetary concerns – is inevitably onerous. Moritz de Hadeln, who has died aged 85, managed it with varying degrees of success not once but five times, with events in Nyon and Locarno in Switzerland, Berlin, Venice and Montreal. The first of these he founded as Visions du Réel, and it was for many years one of the premier documentary festivals in the world.
During the mid-1970s, De Hadeln was invited to take over the Locarno film festival, and passed over control of the Nyon event to his wife, Erika von dem Hagen, whom he had married in 1968. In record time, he transformed the fairly staid festival in southern Switzerland into one of the most controversial events in the movie calendar.
