A film 28 years in the making and shot across 24 countries, Tarsem’s gonzo masterpiece The Fall has long been woefully unavailable. The 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival saw a new 4K restoration, done in collaboration with MUBI, premiere on the 8,000-seat Piazza Grande in Locarno.

For this episode of our podcast Locarno Meets, Tarsem sat down for an in-depth discussion of this great UFO of film history, telling the epic story of its making, of the reasons for its long-time unavailability, of how it was rejected by studios and critics but revered as a cult classic by fans, and how seeing it on the big screen at the Locarno Film Festival is the best kind of validation.