Dir: Fabrice du Welz | Doc, 83

Dans ce road movie en noir et blanc, Béatrice Dalle, marche sur les traces de la vie de Pier Paolo Pasolini. Béatrice Dalle place très haut dans son estime Pier Paolo Pasolini. Selon elle, Pasolini et Jean-Luc Godard sont les meilleurs réalisateurs.

Dans ce film documentaire, l’actresse française, bien connue pour Betty Blue parcours l’Italie à la rencontre de ceux qui ont connus Pasolini. D’Ostie, lieu de l’assassinat de Pasolini, à Matera, lieu du tournage de l’Évangile selon Saint Matthieu, Béatrice Dalle et son traducteur, Clément Roussier, explorent les lieux importants de Pasolini.

Nous découvrons Pasolini à travers l’amour singulier de Béatrice. Nous découvrons aussi Béatrice Dalle avec le regard complice de Clément Roussier. C’est une écorchée vive de la vie. Elle est attachante lorsqu’elle parle de ses passions et aussi de ses conneries. @Gerard Marcade

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Virgil Vernier | Doc France

Afine, la trentaine, vit à Monaco. Un matin, un homme qui court six jours par semaine, lui propose de devenir son coach sportif de façon à lui sculpter un corps de rêve. On se demande si Afine a eu une relation avec cet homme. La scène suivante montre Afine en présence d’une femme beaucoup plus âgée. Il est un gigolo. Il se botox les lèvres et mène une vie oisive sur la Côte-d’Azur.

Un peu plus tard, Afine et trois amies discutent de leurs relations sexuelles avec les clients. Le sujet est surtout de gagner un maximum d’argent pour pouvoir vivre plus aisément. Les trois amies s’en vont à Singapour en espérant y trouver une vie meilleure.

Noël 2022, il partage le réveillon avec une amie serbe qui a la garde d’une adolescente. Lors de cette veillée de Noël, on a l’impression que les trois personnes forment une jolie famille recomposée. Il n’en est rien. Son amie serbe est, elle aussi, une prostituée qui se cherche une reconversion. L’adolescente est une chinoise dont les parents font du business dans le bâtiment. Ils construisent un complexe immobilier à Monaco et aussi une île quelque part.

Les scènes très lentes et surtout les plans fixes, semblent montrer l’ennui de cet hiver 2023 ou peut-être seulement l’ennui du protagoniste principal. C’est au tour de son amie serbe de partir. Nous sommes en janvier 2023. C’est la fin des vacances scolaires. L’adolescente chinoise doit reprendre l’école. Afine regarde son amie serbe et la jeune chinoise partir en hélicoptère. La vie d’Afine est vide. On ne lui voit pas de centre d’intérêt. Gérard Marcadé

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | MAIN COMPETITION

Dir: Ben Rivers | Uk Doc

Enigmatic award-winning cinematic maverick Ben Rivers, who crossed between the chasm that separates cinema and video art, returns with another look at Jake Williams; who he has featured in his early shorts and the feature film Two Years At Sea. The film will premiere as part of the International Competition at this year’s Locarno film festival.

Made over a period of around a year, Rivers went up to Scotland five times during that period, staying for 10 days on each visit, and as usual he shot on his own old Bolex and a super 16mm Aaton. Like the previous film this gives the film an unworldly look akin to the silent cinema of both Dreyer and Murnau.

The subject of Bogancloch is Jake Williams, a spiritual cousin to the American transcendentalists. A modern day frontiersman who lives in the highlands of Scotland. His life is very much a physical one. He’s a musician and he also used to work as a supply science teacher at a local school. One sequence shows him in the classroom with a group of kids who listen in rapt attention as he explains the inner workings of the sun. This is very much a different way of living, one even that can be envied.

There is a sense of stillness, always it seems in the work of Rivers, alongside sound and found musical experiences, which feature among others: everything from jazz to campfire singalongs to Persian and Indian music and even a bit of the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

There is no explanation or simplistic contextualisation, there just is. There are colourful inserts of degrading photographs the younger Jake had taken on his travels as a merchant seaman mainly in the Middle East and India. Everything you need to know should breathe in through the lines of Williams’ face. A face that makes one think of other lived in faces of experience: Auden and Beckett.

This a film of purity, of both vision and existence. At times there is a dancing sense of kinesis at the edge of the frame that makes it seem like remembrance of things past while being situated in the real. A flickering in sparks and electricity that indicates the  flickering flame of Brechtian doubt which proves the real.

As we watch in wonder one thinks: are we observing reality or in reality? Rivers seems to discover a place where he is forgotten and his subjects just are. He has discovered the anti uncertainty principle it seems.

Illustrating time is difficult (as it is a construct), it is different when anxious or happy. That is subjective time, then there is objective time which is mechanical and cannot be argued with. The Greeks know and understand this and separated time into either Chronos time or Kairos time which is the qualitative time of life. Kairos dictates what is said and done, and must be done at the right time. This is pure cinematic Kairos.

As the film progresses and near to the point we will leave it, the image seems to want to fold in on itself to slowly disintegrate, like all analog film will eventually do. At the end we are left with a man in a hot bath outside alongside the elements of winter as we slowly pull away and for moments we could be in an early Georges Méliès film until we become lost in metaphysics and space. ©️D W Mault

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | INTERNATIONAL COMPÉTITION

Dir: John Sturges | US Western 78′

John Sturges of The Great Escape fame started life as an editor before Harry Cohn, president of Columbia, offered him a job after the war when the studio made cheap pictures appealing to distributors. Sturges’ final film there was this high quality western made in Death Valley where the mercury was touching 49 degrees.

An intrepid search for gold – purportedly buried in a waggon – kicks off on the Mexican border where the shifting sands sparkle in Charles Lawton Jr’s chiaroscuro cinematography. The bounty hunters are Randolph Scott, William Bishop, Jerome Courtland and Ella Raines and their turbulent travails are accompanied by the dulcet strains of crooner Josh White’s guitar. Such was the heat that the sweat evaporated from the actors’ bodies so Sturges was obliged to adorn them in grease and glycerine to mimic it. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | RETROSPECTIVE 2024

Dir: Luca Bellini, Silvia Luzi | Italy Drama 92’

Episodes from the life of Luce an aimless young woman living in Rome is the latest feature from director duo Luca Bellini and Silvio Luzzi. 

Partly told in Roman dialect the drama unfolds in bleak winter in a cold and rainy Southern Italy: One day on the beach, Luce has a sudden inspiration, and from that moment on her life also becomes someone else’s. A voice on her cellphone provides a tenuous line between her desires, her imagination, and the world around her.

Luce is disillusioned by love and life in general. By day she works in a noisy leather factory – and this is film that is incredibly noisy with its jarring score – by night she hangs out with an unreliable photographer in a relationship that’s heading nowhere. The women in her life are mostly unsupportive and tell her not to take life so seriously. So much for the sisterhood.

But one day on the beach she gets an idea in her head and becomes obsessed by it. Then come the anonymous phone calls from a man claiming to be her father. This disembodied stranger offers comfort and stability and the intimacy she has been missing. But is this just another man to let her down, or is it her real father?. Fact and fantasy meld and mesmerise us in this fuzzy reverie.

Essentially a one-hander with close up and personal camerawork from Jacopo Caramella and driven forward by its antsy atmosphere we really gets inside Luce’s world and experience what it’s like to be a downcast twenty something: confused, depressed and lonely. Marianna Fontana gives a soulful and sensitive interpretation of Luce in this intimate and refreshingly novel portrait of modern womanhood untethered by kids, companionship and close caring family. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Richard Hunter | United Kingdom · 2024 · DCP 2K  · 108′ · o.v. English / Mandarin

Richard hunter has made a bit of a name for himself in the disgusting horror genre so his feature debut more or less speaks for itself and lives up to expectations with its vile and often ludicrous compendium of short stories vignetting the unkind, unpleasant or squeamishly ghastly unfolding as a collection of filmed sequences all based on reality.

Along similar lines to TVs Candid Canera – if you remember it – albeit with a macabre twist, this has to be seen to be believed. The characters are nasty, weird and some are just downright sad – like the guy who orders a pair of six inches long shorts. Or the porn addicted vicar stuck in a sexless marriage and plagued by maggot-infested cupboards conjuring up the worst fears of sleeping in your own bedroom.

Hunter intertwines them together to provide a running gag that ramps up a low level tension. It keeps us gripped to the screen throughout  the feature’s one and three quarter hour’s running time. Ultimately watchable and entertaining this is easy and enjoyable viewing although the final reveals are more bathetic than satisfying. @MeredithTaylor

FOUL EVIL DEEDS (CONCORSO CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE) Saturday 8th at 6pm

Dir: Freddy McDonald | Thriller 95’ 2024

A girl inherits her mother’s failing sewing business but soon finds herself spinning the perfect crime with the tools of her trade in this ingenious, if repetitive, feature debut from Freddy McDonald screening at the Locarno International Film Festival’s 77th edition  

Barbara’s mother’s has only one customer left – and boy is she difficult and rude. Grace Vessier (Caroline Goodall) is getting married for the third time — her house is in an Alpine valley; providing the film with its stunning scenery. Quite why it’s set in Switzerland is never explained as all the characters speak English.

During the fraught fitting Barbara (Eve Connolly) drops a vital pearl button from Grace’s dress, so she must rush back to base on a life-changing journey. And it’s here that matters turn criminal. On the road back Barbara comes across an accident – or is it? Two bleeding bikers (Calum Worth, John Lynch), a briefcase, two guns and several bags of a white powder are strewn across the tarmac.

Sew Torn is a tricksy bit of Neo noir Macdonald making use of repetative motifs in a multi-stranded narrative that mulls over Barbara’s possible options in what soon emerges is a botched drug deal.

Should she commit the “Perfect crime… Call the police… Drive away.” Her mind whirls with questions. At first she thinks of driving off with the briefcase, presumably full of loot.  Barbara mulls over the three options, each is explored with their various outcomes, and this is where the repetitive element kicks in. None are ideal but probably the final one that involves a dance routine in a bar is watchable. Barbara may have an ailing business on her hands but she sure is imaginative. MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL | AUGUST 2024

Locarno International Film Festival 2024 starts on August the 7th on the mountainside shores of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland’s Ticino canton. Here are some films to look out for:

PIAZZA GRANDE strand

La Deluge

The last days of Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV play out in the lavish costume drama from Gianluca Godice and starring Guillaume Canet and Melanie Laurent.

Lady from Shanghai (1947)

Directed by Orson Wells this cult classic is screening as part of this year’s Retrospective ‘Lady with a Torch – The Centenary of Columbia Pictures’.  The film has been restored from a 4k scan of the original negative with a restored audio from the 35mm nitrate original soundtrack negative  

Gaucho Gaucho (2024)

Dwek and Kershaw’s pristine black and white images are the stars of this fascinating sortie into the world of the Argentinian horseman, both male and female

Timestalker (2024)

The definition of madness: Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. English writer/director Alice Lowe’s entertaining imagination looks at one woman’s amorous experiences.

CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE strand

Foul Evil Deeds (2024) 

Evil knows no bounds according to this horror feature from UK director Richard Hunter who dives into the minds of the bad and bizarre with his candid camera.

La Passion Selon Béatrice (2024)

Belgian maverick director Fabrice Du Welz returns this time in black white and casting Beatrice Dalle in a physiological thriller

FUORI CONCORSO strand

Romanian auteur Radu Jude wowed audiences with his proactive comp title Do Not Expect much From the End of the World that took the jury prize at last year’s Locarno. This time he has two films at this 77th edition – the enigmatically entitled Sleep #2 (that has no dialogue) and Eight Postcards from Utopia that captures his post-socialist homeland through the medium of advertising.

Raiz (2024)

Past and present collide in this enchanting award-winning drama from Franco Garcia Becerra that had already garnered prizes at Berlinale and Seattle this year, and follows an eight-year-old alpaca farmer Feliciano. He is ecstatic when Peru has the opportunity to qualify for the World Cup.

CRITICS WEEK strand

Beyond Guilt (2024)

The true crime genre is perhaps one of the most popular with the audience today. TV series, podcasts, and documentaries all over the world investigate murders, disappearances, and other crime events with an emotional emphasis on victims and perpetrators. In contrast Beyond Guilt looks at the “collateral” victims of a shocking serial murder case, documenting the daily life of the parents of Niels Högel, a German serial killer nurse convicted of killing about 90 patients.

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Edgar Pera | Experimental/Fantasy Doc | Portugal 2024

Hats are the watchwords in this beguiling cinematic creation from Portuguese maverick filmmaker Edgar Pera.

Zooming in over the skyscrapers of New York this monochrome musing explores and draws comparisons between the enigmatic lives of two contemporary writers from the modernist literary movement: Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), who adopted a series of different noms de plume each with their own separate intellectual Identity, and the horror poet and novelist Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937).

Worlds apart yet united by their unique brand of science fiction horror the two engaged in correspondence, although they never came face to face. Pessoa was best known for his idiosyncratic heteronyms (a word that has a different pronunciation and meaning from another word but the same spelling eg ‘tear’) to reflect on how individuals can also have multiple personas and different facets of their own lives. The multi-coloured frames contain a series of black and white photos of be-hatted men who each utter maxims from the annuls of literature.

The maverick Portuguese moviemaker Edgar Pera makes us of split screens, Ai generated images and a syncopated electronic score with his signature echoing voices (think O Barao) creating possibly the most meaty and accomplished experimental horror of his career to date. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | CONCORSO INTERNATIONAL 2024

Dir: Ena Sendijarevic | Cast: Renée Soutendijk, Hayati Azis, Lisa Zweerman, Florian Myjer, Muhammad Khan, Hans Dagalet, Rio Den Haas | Dutch, Drama 102’

This stylish and sumptuous Colonial satire is the sophomore feature of Bosnian Dutch director Ana Sendijarevic who was lauded with multiple awards on the festival circuit with her debut Take Me Somewhere Nice.

Sweet Dreams harks back to Holland’s prosperous colonial roots in the Dutch East Indies where subversive things are happening in the tropical heat of a verdant sugar plantation in 1900. Much to the cynical consternation of his elegant wife Agatha (Renée Soutendijk), the ageing owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) has fathered a child, Karel (Rio Kai Den Haas) with his Indonesian housekeeper Siti (Hayati Azis) but subsequently meets his maker after a bed-hopping episode one steamy night.

Naturally nothing will be the same again as the family, son Cornelius (Florian Myjer) and his pregnant wife Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) crack the whip but are then exposed to the coalface of colonialism when they discover that Karel is the sole heir to family fortune but also that housemaid and her partner Reza (Muhammad Khan) refuse to continuing kowtowing to his command and are plunged into a state of gently controlled emotional chaos in the sweltering heat of the jungle.

Sendijarevic’s sympathies are clear; the colonials are painted as vile caricatures, but she creates just the right enigmatic atmosphere of subterfuge that occasionally echoes Wes Anderson and Lucrecia Martel (Zama). With a deft lightness of touch Sweet Dreams captures this exploitative state of affairs with humour and immaculate set pieces in an amusingly surreal drama driven forward by an evocative almost overpowering occasional score by Martial Foe. 

Ana Sendijarevic and her DoP Emo Weemhoff shoot in the 1.33:1 Academy ratio in a story divided into chapters. This keeps us at a respectable distance from a rather melancholic narrative that marks the end of an era for Western dominance as the Dutch lose their control on a previously ordered colonial existence which ended when Indonesia declared independence in August 1945. @MeredithTaylor

NETHERLANDS OSCAR ENTRY | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023

https://youtu.be/p8TLjO7WMI0?si=xT5PWKmhxUC1o6G6

Dir/Wri: Claudia Rorarius | Cast: Stavros Zafeiris, Isold Halldórudóttir | German, Drama 135′

Imagine a life without love or physical closeness. That lot falls to a paraplegic man in this thoughtful drama from German filmmaker Claudia Rorarius. Essentially a two-hander Touched explores the importance of power and control in human relationships. And while Alex may be physically powerless, his strong personality more than makes up for it when lonely caregiver Maria arrives. The physically challenged patient soon realises he is playing with fire.

Dark and good-looking, Alex (Stavros Zafeiris) has previously enjoyed a varied love life, like any man of his age. But paralysis makes him understandably frustrated and desperate. And we really feel for him. Maria (Icelandic plus-size model Isold Halldórudóttir) is blond and blue-eyed but grossly obese. But after Alex tries to commit suicide in the rehabilitation centre’s exercise pool, she embarks on an illicit attachment to her patient which is deemed below the belt by medical standards, despite Alex’s positive response.

At first Alex appears to be the victim of circumstance, claiming he would never date Maria in real life. But he soon appears to wield the power in this ‘folie a deux’ (that involves graphic sex scenes). Maria is then threatened with the sack when she is discovered in Alex’s bed one morning, the two having spent the night together.

With extraordinary intuitive performances from Halldórudóttir and Zafeiris (which won them a Pardo Award in this year’s Concorso Cineasti del presente), and minimal dialogue, Touched gently unpacks this unconventional relationship in a spare, slow-burning and sensually rich character drama. One of the most provocative films in the year’s Cineasti del Presente line-up at Locarno Film Festival 2023.

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Dir/Wri: Victoria Musiedlak | Cast: Noée Abita, Anders Danielsen Lie, Alexis Neises, François Morel, Saadia Bentaïeb | France, Drama

A girl discovers the real world in this erotic legal love story from French director Victoria Musiedlak. Premiere Affaire is one of the juiciest films to hit the Piazza Grande at this year’s Locarno’s 76th edition.

Sex is variably at centre of any drama where the French are involved and Premiere Affaire has a clever title that cuts both ways: as a first love affair and debut criminal case in the life of budding lawyer Nora, a mesmerising Noée Abita, who soon discovers that life is not as simple as it first appears. And Musiedlak doesn’t give her main character a smooth ride in this classically styled ‘school of hard knocks’ outing.

Fresh out of law school, naive Nora, 26, is working in the Paris cabinet of a suave but sharp as nails commercial advocate when she opts to take on a criminal case, that of a gauche young man Jordan Blesy (Alexis Neises) accused of murdering his sister’s friend. Here she will learn her first lesson: don’t get romantically involved with your colleagues. Enter the police officer assigned to the case, Alexis (Danielsen Lie). The two eye each other up warily and Nora, while gamine and vulnerable, is not one to be trifled with, giving the film its raunchy style. And credit to Musiedlak who opts for a feminine touch making their love scenes intensely titillating rather than uncomfortable to watch.

Clearly this is a story fraught with ethical and moral issues – not to mention racial tensions: Nora is of Maghrebi heritage and her mother is sceptical of her daughter’s career and provides the negative undertones so frequently present in intergenerational narratives of this kind. Meanwhile, Nora is burning the candle at both ends in taking on a case that runs contrary to her official remit in the commercial cabinet, so there’s never a dull moment, and certainly no easy answers in this stunning first feature from the French writer/director. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | PIAZZA GRANDE 2023

Dir: Marina Vroda | Ukraine/Gerrmany/Poland/Slovakia | Drama

Ukraine has suffered a grim recent history and this first feature from award-winning filmmaker Marina Vroda certainly captures past and present in this weary plod through one family’s existence, informed by the director’s own experience.

In the running for the Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard, Stepne is set in a bleak village where Anatoly (Oleksandr Maksiakov) has come home Soumy to care for his moribund mother (a spry Nina Antonova). Food shortages, numbing cold and miserable neighbours make this a thankless task but the tenderness between the two, who are joined by his brother (Oleg Primogenov) adds a glimmer of warmth to this otherwise gruelling family portrait.

Sharing stories that express the pain of the past and the future the elderly inhabitants flesh out what is otherwise a unerringly dismal exhausted portrait of Ukrainian identity and their flecks of flinty humour show a spirit and a resilience which has to be admired. They are made of sterner stuff than the younger generation who are gradually learning what it means to survive in a place beset by conflict due to the ongoing war. A difficult watch but a worthwhile one. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN LEOPARD 2023

Dir: Alejandro Galindo | Cast: David Silva, Victor Parra, Martha Valdez, Oscar Pulido | Mexico Adventure 111’

One of the most topical features in this year’s Locarno Mexico retrospective is one of the most lyrical contemplations on the nature of belonging ever to hit the silver screen. Golden Era director Alejandro Galindo subtly explores the pros and cons of economic migration in a black and white adventure drama that often romanticises the eternal search for a better existence while glorifying the mother country of his native Mexico.

Starring David Silva (as Rafael) and Martha Valdes (as Maria) this soulful black and white beauty unfolds on the Mexican border on the banks of the Rio Grande. On one side there is the burgeoning wealth of late 1950s America where ‘everyone has a car’. On the other, Spanish is spoken and traditional life holds sway amid the proud poverty of Mexico where, due to an accident of birth, people strive to survive and eke out an existence while always hoping to make it over to the ‘other side’, with or without papers, to a place where the streets are paved with gold.

In the dead of night amid twinkling stars and the ambient sound of nature a group of Mexican men are seen furtively making their way down to the river’s edge where they embark on the short journey to the other side of the river. Suddenly, sirens blare and shots ring out over the rippling waters captured in Rosalio Solano’s pristine velvety visuals. One of the men sinks below the surface, his only plea is to be taken back to die on the Mexican side where he is serenaded by a sultry solo guitar.

There are joyful moments too in this melancholy melodrama. Carnival time sees the camera soar about the crowds in an amazing overhead shot, the camera then dips down into the crowd where Rafael is enjoying a street-side hamburger (‘without the mustard’!). But life without papers is no picnic. In the railway sidings bound for Colorado Rafael strikes up a friendship with the joker of the piece, one Luis Villarreal (Pulido), who takes a laidback approach to living as a drifter away from home. He provides the film with a much needed dose of dark humour offering Capra-esque social commentary (“I thought about converting to communism, but then they told me ‘everyone still has to work”.) Eventually securing casual labour with an American called Mr Sterling Rafael becomes a slave to the arduous grind of railroad construction, and discovers that Catch 22 still persists despite making it to the ‘promised land’ and this strand gives the film its dramatic twist.

Filled with nostalgic songs from back home this soulful film portrays Mexicans as a deeply sentimental people striving for a better life while celebrating their family traditions and rich culture of the homeland. Wet Shoulders also highlights the plight of second generation Mexicans born in the US and now finding themselves lost in a halfway house where they no longer belong back home, or in America. A thematically rich drama about the basic dignity of belonging, earning a living and being able to hold your head high wherever you are in the world. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | MEXICAN RETROSPECTIVE 2023

Dir: Maria Gisèle Royo, Julia de Castro | Spain, Drama 72′

Two friends set off for one last hurrah in this erotic roadie reverie, shot entirely on 16mm, from Spanish co-directors Maria Gisèle Royo and Julia de Castro who have explored their own maternal instincts and come to the conclusion that their first feature is the ultimate form of giving birth.

The sexually adventurous Milagros (Julia de Castro), 37, is keen to make the most of her final fertile years in a frantic search for a male of the species. Jonathan (Omar Ayuso), still in his early twenties, is seeking solace in Grindr, scrolling through potential penises in a bid to find the perfect mate to overcome his vulnerability issues. The two are joined by a mysterious Asian Babe who calls herself La Reina de Triana (Chacha Huang) and whose only desire is to become a traditional housewife and look after her husband and kids.

So off they go along the sandy coastlines of Andalusia – from Malaga to Cadiz – in a stylish white decapotable. This unbridled and often ill-considered odyssey comes to represent their atavistic need to procreate: The mates they yearn in this scattergun search may be entirely unsuitable but the chemical drive to replicate ourselves has nothing to do with reason. The notion that we are any freer in the 21st century than we were in the Dark Ages is just a myth. Our three protagonists are all the victims of their biology and physicals drives, and they are acting on these forces in weird and wonderful ways. On The Go is a spirited and often misfiring attempt to portray this heady time on the big screen.  MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE 2023

Dir/Wr: Roman de Saint-Blanquat | Cast: Leonie Dahan-Lamort, Lilith Grasmug, Fred Blin, Cyril Metzger | France Horror

French filmmaker Romain de Saint-Blanquat has created an entire universe with his enticing feature debut echoing the style of Jean Rollin’s Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), Suspiria or even Blanche (1971) by Walerian Borowczyk, and complete with a sixties-style soundtrack. Even the actors have evocative names.

This retro vampire fable unfolds in a Catholic convent in 1967 where Françoise (suggestively played by Leonie Dahan-Lamort) is a febrile seventeen-year-old boarder obsessed with morbid thoughts that focus on her own imminent death on the eve of Lent when the spirits will run wild and evil spirits roam free to tempt the unsuspecting.

Convinced she has only one more night on Earth, she escapes the confines of her all-girl dormitory to free herself of this final evening along with her friend Delphine (Lilith Grasmug) and some other friends. The idea is to indulge in gaudy style fancy dress party in an abandoned house deep in the woods where they can ‘live life to the lees’, as Keats put it.

Here Francoise drifts into a bizarre Gothic reverie buoyed by her emotions that play on the subconscious in a realm of the senses teetering on the edge of sanity all the time dicing with danger in her need for cathartic release. There’s a sexual edge to this sortie into the sensual abyss and it comes in the shape of Cyril Metzger’s character who supplies a much needed male element for her to act on as seductress and potentially even succubus – if her fears are realised – in the afterlife. And with this reversal of traditional vampire tropes the film feels refreshingly ‘de nos jours’.

La Morsure may not be totally original in concept but it is certainly an adventurous and enticing giallo-style fantasy and a beguiling addition to the vampire genre. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2023 | CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE

Delve inside this year’s Locarno International Film Festival line-up and you’ll discover some intriguing feature premieres playing in the Cineasti del Presente, Fuori Concorso and even Piazza Grande sections:

Mimi – The Prince of Darkness (2023): Brando De Sica (Italy)

Curiosity is drawn to Brando De Sica’s macabre-sounding thriller that centres on Mimi, a reclusive teenager who works in a small pizzeria in Naples. A strange rumour has it he was abandoned in childhood due to his deformed feet, now hidden by orthopaedic boots. There’s something of the Diane Arbus to this horror outing from the Rome-born director, writer and sound designer, and we want to know more especially in the light of the  caveat: “could upset sensitive viewers” .

FUORI CONCORSO 2023

Cuvari Formule (2023) Dragan Bjelogrlic): (Serbia)

In 1958 during the Cold War, two scientists at the Vinca Institute in Belgrade pit their wits in a race for survival in an edgy sci-fi outing written and directed by Serbia’s best known film director Dragan Bjelogrlic and based on the novel by Goran Milasinovic.

PIAZZA GRANDE 2023

Camping du Lac: Eleonore Saintagnan (2023) (Belgium)

When Eleonore’s car breaks down in the middle of rural Brittany she rents a bungalow and becomes enveloped in a strange lakeside fantasy world as the past and present fuse in this magical drama from this first time Belgian filmmaker.

CONCORSO CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE 2023

copyright Cedric Gentil

Continent Magnétique (2023): Luc Jacquet (France)

The few thousand kilometres that separate Patagonia to the South Pole provide a fascinating and hypnotic journey for explorers. Some even speak of an addiction to “the Antarctic bite” but don’t translate this into to French. The March of the Penguins director Luc Jacquet has been experiencing the phenomenon for 30 years. This time, he returns for a visually-striking adventure that somehow feels like a final journey to a vanishing continent and its inhabitants. MT

PIAZZA GRANDE 2023

What Remains (2022): Ran Huang (UK)

British-educated Chinese filmmaker Ran Huang’s makes his feature debut with this 1990s set psychological thriller that unfolds in a Finnish psychiatric hospital where a therapist (Andrea Riseborough) and a policeman (Stellen Skarsgard) slowly fall under the spell of one of their patients who confesses to a series of grisly murders.

FUORI CONCORSO 2023

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2-12 AUGUST 2023

Dir: Nikolaus Geyrhalter | Doc, Austria, 100′

Moop: Matter out of place refers to any object not associated with the immediate environment

A mechanical digger buries its steel fist deep into a grassy field in the outskirts of some Austrian city. Earthy clay soil soon gives way to sodden slate-coloured mud. But wait – there a tyres here, planks of wood and glass bottles, even a newspaper – still legible – a can of tomatoes and ‘Nestle’ labels everywhere. This is a landfill site revealing its fascinating  contemporary history of sordid ‘treasures’ hidden deep along the water table. The man in charge of the dig has spent a whole career investigating such hidden refuse buried out of sight, but now not out of mind.

Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter has spent a lifetime documenting the world, and winning awards for his unique and enquiring vision. From The Border Fence, to Homo sapiens and Earth he takes a route less travelled to unveil the unusual and oblique that often stares us right in the face. And here he exposes the squalid world of refuse in a way that is both horrifying and compelling.

In Koman, Northern Albania, ‘volunteers for a clean space’ project have put themselves forward to collect rubbish from a limpid lakeside littered with ‘moop’ from nearby towns and villages. Loading the bags into a makeshift van, the debris soon fills the entire vehicle that trundles off to its more ecological destination. A job well done. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Meanwhile in Nepal, streams and rivulets are festooned with plastic detritus that give a ghostly appearance to the surrounding countryside. Here, lorries packed sky-high with waste struggle through muddy uphill tracks and are often given a push by forklift trucks as they transport their lofty cargoes bound for a landfill site high on the mountainside. Women there sort through the bags, often taking random items to redistribute back in their villages. There is whole industry at work involving rubbish re-sale, but that’s for another film.

Even at the summit of a snowy Swiss mountain, rubbish soon builds up from bars and restaurants there to serve skiers’ requirements. And images of these glistening widescreen snowscapes contrast with those of a palm-fringed creamy white beach in the Maldives where staff toil endlessly to sweep away any sign of moop. This is then carted off to more landfill sites where the cardboard is set alight giving off noxious fumes that only add to the pollution.

Ecological progress has been made in some countries where domestic refuse is sorted by mammoth machines and manpower, sorting plastic from glass, paper from tin and relocating the remains for further processing in the recycling battle. Geyrhalter’s fellow countryman Michael Glawogger showed how industrial waste is dealt with or – let’s say relocated – to the developing world in his shocking expose 2014 Workingman’s Death 

Moop has invaded not only our countryside but also the sea.  In Greece, expert divers scour the shallows and depths of the ocean to forage for moop which is then bagged and floated up to the surface where white polythene sacks will remove it by boat to the mainland.

And what about that enormous sofa or double bed that mysteriously found its way onto the pavement in the middle of the night. These are sent to specialised recycling centres to be gobbled up and coughed out by the powerful rotating jaws of industrial disposal units, and gradually pulverised with water into aggregate-style dust.

Artfully framed and (delightfully) without dialogue or explanation Geyrhalter lets his startling pictures tell a grim story whose final eerie images explode into hope at the Burning Man festival in Nevada.

This film about rubbish it is certainly not rubbish, but a fascinating, disturbing and important testament to how our planet is slowly being destroyed by ourselves. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Dir/Wri: Helena Wittmann | Drama 106 mins.

Germany’s Helena Wittman made a name for herself five years ago with the experimental maritime debut Drift, and here takes another dip in the water with an enigmatic sea-faring piece that haunts the imagination – up to a point – with its woozy rhythm and limpid seascapes.

It follows a group of aimless yachties – a female captain Ida (Angeliki Papoulia) and her male sailors – who drift around the Mediterranean coast around Marseilles ending up in Sidi Bel Abbes (Algeria) when Ida becomes entranced with the vestiges of the French Foreign Legion and decides to the investigate further.

During this languorous cinematic voyage there are fleeting interludes that hint at romance for Ida and her crew but nothing of any substance in a scenario where style rather than substance is the order of the day. What starts as intriguing soon becomes torpid as we mull through the various enigmatic hints at our disposal that eventually leave us wondering – who exactly are these people, who is funding them, and what is end point of their dilettante journey into the unknown?

Women have long been portrayed in sea-going dramas – most recently in Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx where a lone woman sailor becomes involved with a group of migrants, and Lucie Borleteau’s Fidelio: Alice’s Journey a much more eventful odyssey where a female engineer entrances a male crew on board a commercial vessel, and, of course, Claire Denis’ all time classic Beau travail involving the French Foreign Legion on land (and also – curiously – starring Denis Lavant who appears here as ‘Galoup’). In comparison, while initially enjoyable, this is a flimsier arthouse film that could almost work as an art installation in somewhere like London’s Royal Academy. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2022 |

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Dir.: Julie Lerat-Gersant; Cast: Pili Groyne, Romane Bohringer, Victoire du Bois, Lucie Charles-Alfred, Suzanne Roy-Lerat, Bilel Chegrani; France 2022, 90 min.

A passionate portrait of teenage pregnancy and parental neglect from first time French filmmaker Julie Learn-Gersant who charts the rollercoaster of anxiety, mixed emotions and shifting alliances for 16-year-old Camille.

Motherhood is a challenging time for everyone. Especially when the baby is unplanned and not necessarily what Camille wants at the age of sixteen. A botched attempt at an abortion sees her heading to Casualty at Cherbourg hospital, along with her mother Clo (du Bois). Pili Groyne is stunning in the main role, a bundle of nerves and neuroses – and for good reason – later the judge will sit down with Clo and tell her, in no uncertain terms, that she has put her daughter’s life at risk.

Camille is adamant about not wanting to keep the baby: “I won’t let it ruin my life”. So in she goes to a special home for pregnant teenagers where Nadine (Bohringer) will be her counsellor. Camille is warned by the girls: “Nadine is on your back, and Salim is her dog”. Four months into the pregnancy Camille still indulges her passion for rollerblading, but Nadine gives her a word of warning. Medhi (Chegrani) her boyfriend is an apprentice seaman, and no more able to cope than Camille. He has managed to put together the money for an abortion in Holland but Camille is resigned to going through with the pregnancy and will give the baby up for adoption.

Later over dinner in a restaurant, Clo passes herself off to her lover Fred as Camille’s sister. In a sad case of history repeating itself, Camille will later find out that her that her mother gave her up for adoption but came back later to claim her – after she had spent six months with foster parents. In the home, Camille makes friends with Alison (Alfred), whose daughter Diana (Roy-Lerat) has asthma – not helped by her mother’s smoking.

Subsequently, Diana is put into care, despite Alison’s protests. A catalogue of disasters follows but Camille still insists her child will be offered to “any bitch who wants her”. Her new friend Laura tells her that she is just like a kangaroo, abandoning her offspring when the going gets tough.  With her term nearly over, Camille is asked to write a letter to her by way of background for the future carers.

DoP Virginie Saint-Martin captures the volatile ambience with a lively, handheld camera in intimate close-ups, and sensitive long shots with the rollerblading Camille. The seaside location adds turbulence but also tranquility to a film that reflect in the emotional ups and downs of its hard-edged contemporary characters who seem to care about nothing but themselves. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | CINEASTES DEL PRESENTE

Dir.: Ery Claver; Cast: Claudia Pacuta, David Caracol, Willi Ribeiro, Liu Xiubing, Clemente Chimuco; Angola 2022, 98 min.

In the second Angolan feature screening at this year’s LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL writer/director Ery Claver envelopes magic realism into a labyrinthine tale involving a trio of turbulent lives in the chaotic capital of Luanda. .

In this metaphor of modern times, one middle-aged woman is having a particularly hard time. In the former glory of her rambling home where he husband Bessa (Caracol) is languishing in bed with a raging fever, Domingas (Pacuta) is trying to fix a hole in the roof while mourning the recent loss of her daughter Mariana, who stills visits her in dreams.  A spiritual healer has brought Domingas some hope by suggesting a shower in the bathroom might in some way help. A prologue sheds some light on the couple who are well respected members of the ruling party. Their regular meetings take place in a half-finished stadium with stands are full of shirts and trousers, rather than actual people.

Bessa is introduced by Chimuco (Chimuco) to other local luminaries, and it soon becomes clear that something is not right: their party leader is nervous, and Bessa interrupts his speech in a move he will later regret. Meanwhile, Chinese mall owner Zhang Wei (Xiubing) has imported a job lot of statues of the Virgin Mary (which glow in the dark) in the hope of making a killing amongst those who believe in her lucky powers. A third narrative strand involves Zoyo (Ribeiro), a young dreamer desperate to track down a close friend who was also in love with Mariana. Zoyo disregards his friend Zhang Wei’s advice, and steals some petrol to make a Molotov Cocktail. But where will he throw the finished article?

DoP Eduardo Kropotkine deserves the lion share of the praise with his muted domestic scenes, lively outdoor images and spectacular shots in the stadium which convey the three different levels of this divided society. Even in Angola Politicians seem to live in another world, with their staff fighting for the left-overs on the buffet in this depressing but only to familiar story brought to the screen with great style and artfulness. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | CONCORSO CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE

Dir: Sylvie Verheyde | Cast: Flavie Delangle, Marina Fois, Benjamin Biolay | France, Romantic drama 110′

A dizzy iconic soundtrack captures the glories of first love and life in the six form in this frisky and freewheeling feature from France’s Sylvie Verheyde. Stella in Love is a cinematic breath of fresh air, and just the kind of film to get the Golden Leopard Competition rocking at Locarno Film Festival’s annual lakeside jamboree.

Not happy at being back at school for her final year after her blissful beach holiday with the girls, seventeen-year-old Stella (a laconic Flavie Delangle – who also narrates) is still reeling from the euphoria of sun, sea and sex. Lost in the reverie of nights with her Italian boyfriend – a first – the return to normality has come as a shock to the system, not to mention the autumn chill in Paris where irreverence is the name of the game. Her mother and father have split, the teacher is boring her with his views on Marxism, or was is Marxist Leninism? Who cares when you can drift off and dream of your lover and swimming in the Med.

In a haze of cigarette smoke and red lipstick Stella – often rocking a chic black cashmere beret – navigates problems at home, a furious feud with her mother (a feisty Marina Fois) a neon-bathed bittersweet birthday party with the gang, life on the breadline, and the shock revelation that her father (Benjamin Biolay at his most louche) has a new baby son. Then she meets Andre.

Stylishly sashaying from night clubs to the stark light of reality, the stress of final exams and working part-time in a bar, there are quieter moments too: secrets shared and thoughts revealed with her best friend Gladys. Christmas spent mooching with her sour-faced mum and the Easter holidays on horseback on a wild, windswept coast. Verheyde has come a long way since her directorial debut A Brother in 1997, and she certainly captures the mood with Stella in Love, reuniting her with the heroine of her third feature Stella (2008). Now at the top of her game Verheyde certainly knows how to make a romantic drama – and this is one of her best. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | GOLDEN LEOPARD COMPETITION.

Dir/Wri: Caterina Mona | Cast: Lulu Mebrahtu, Tedros Teclebrhan, Hermela Tekleab, Fanuel Mengstab | Swiss, Drama 85′

Heritage and traditional values threaten to disrupt the life of a single mother newly arrived in Zurich in this straightforward but solid debut feature from Swiss writer director Caterina Mona.

Semret feels like any other trans-cultural drama with its focus on how past trauma affects first generation immigrants trying to make a better life for their families in Europe. Writing and directing, Mona explores how these values can hold back the next generation, impinging on their freedom of choice.

Semret lives a modest and socially repressed life in Zurich where she clings to her more progressive teenage daughter Joe (Tekleab). Training to be a midwife at a teaching hospital in the Swiss German capital certainly has its challenges: And Semret struggles with the new language and a different culture, not to mention the emotional baggage she has brought with her from Etritrea. The arrival of hospital porter and fellow Eritrean Yemane (Teclebrhan) is certainly welcome at first. But this new relationship also forces Semret to face her own demons, or risk becoming a social recluse. And like many mothers all over the world, she has very mixed feelings about Joe’s friendship with Yemane’s teenage son Tesheme (Mengstab).

Although there are no surprises on the cinematic front, Mona tackles this no-frills feature with confidence, unpacking the various aspects of the immigration experience with insight and maturity. Supported by an impressive cast – many of them newcomers – Semret is a promising start from the Swiss filmmaker. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | PIAZZA GRANDE 2022 | LEOPARDS OF TOMORROW

Dir: Bianca Lucas | US Drama 84′

A slim but evocative portrait of post traumatic disorder from first time feature director Bianca Lucas, one of a group of filmmakers who were the first generation of Bela Tarr’s film.factory in Sarajevo. Essentially a one-hander Love Dog sees a Texas oil rig work retreat to his Mississippi origins suffering from emotional and physical pain after the death of his girlfriend.

Once again the animal kingdom comes to the rescue. Although the main character, played by John Dicks – who also co-writes – at first rejects the one-legged dog who will keep him company (along with copious fags and alcohol) during his house-sitting, by the end the two will become inseparable, a testament to the healing power of our canine companions.

A freewheeling, impressionistic narrative sees the man’s mood range from catatonia to utter desperation as he rages against a system that has left him high and dry without motivation or meaning in his life, as he perpetually seeks answers to questions and searches his soul for inspiring ideas that will kick start his future. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2022 | CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE 2022

Dir: Patricia Mazuy | Cast: Arieh Worthalter, Achille Reggiani | French/Belgian thriller 114′

Not since Gaspar Noe’s 2002 thriller Irreversible has a rape scene been so violent as pictured in this police thriller from Patricia Mazuy. The French director is no stranger to Locarno Film Festival. In 1993 she won a Bronze Leopard for an episode in the TV series Tous les Garcons et les Filles de Leurs Age.

Saturn Bowling sees her return to the lakeside competition with a moody and viciously violent police thriller that channels the savagery of the wild into a shocking story of misogyny, murder and mutilation in the suburbs of Paris.

Arieh Worthalter is mesmerising as Guillaume the police detective in the midst of the mayhem. It leaves him no time to run the bowling ring and men’s dining club – with its extensive library of horrifying hunting themed videos – he has just inherited from his late father. Romance is also on the cards with an animal behaviourist (Lucas) who is helping with the investigation. But leaving the management of his club to his troubled half brother Armand (Reggiani) is a decision he will live to regret. No sooner has his back turned than things start to go wrong. Meanwhile, women are being menaced and murdered left right and centre, and Guillaume is getting nowhere with the investigation.

Of course, from early brutal scenes we all know who is responsible, but will they be stopped in their tracks?. Mazuy keeps the tension bubbling away with her regular co-writer Yves Thomas. Simon Beaufils does the rest, seting the tone with his neon-infused visuals, keeping things dark and mysterious, accompanied by an evocative occasional score from composer trio Wyatt E, Sebastian Landauer and Stephane Rondia. A captivating modern day thriller from another female French director at the top of her game who is not afraid to tell it like it really is. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Dir: Michele Vanucci | Cast: Alessandro Borghi, Luigi Lo Cascio, Marius Bizau, Emilia Scarpati Fanetti | Drama Italy, 105′

Italy’s Po Delta is the setting for this atmospheric river bound Western based on a vendetta between local fishermen and poachers. Delta is a powerful feature arousing strong emotions based on racial prejudice and the desperation of those trying to escape the past or survive the privations of a future in poverty.

This impressive second feature for Italian director Michele Vanucci follows Osso (Lo Cascio) a well-meaning volunteer working to save the river from overfishing at the hands of the Florians, a family on the run from Eastern Europe who are now plundering the river’s rich fish stocks flouting local bylaws introduced in the 1980s to protect fishing rights.

The Florians have joined forces with baleful petty criminal Elia (Borghi), now back in town after living abroad. Osso and Elio go back a long way and share a bitter history. Elio had a relationship with Osso’s ex-wife Anna (Scarpati Fanetti) and is still in love with her. But however hostile Elio and his gang become in maintaining their position, Osso is not going to back down on an issue close to his heart.

Creating a palpable sense of place in this region of murky mists and rich heritage, Vanucci weaves into the narrative original archive footage and photos of traditional fisherman going about their business to illustrate the intensity of feeling the river and its wildlife hold for local inhabitants.

Overwhelmed by blind violence, the two rivals will face each other in the fog of the Delta as their internecine struggle intensifies in this compelling and original feature echoing the gritty style of Giuseppe De Santis and driven forward by passionate performances from Italian star duo Alessandro Borghi and Luigi Lo Cascio. MT

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2022

Dir: Alessandro Comodin | Cast: Pier Luigi Mecchia, Ezio Massarutto, Annaluisi Ferrari | Drama 104′

A silly argument gets out of control in the open scenes of this absurd dark docu-comedy from Venetian filmmaker Alessandro Comedian. What it all boils down to is the petty small-mindedness of everyday life in the rural village of Malafesta (Veneto) where the police spend the days justifying their existence, pursuing every line of inquiry no matter how trivial: a car parked the wrong way up a side street, a dog with an usual bark is about as exciting as it gets.

Nothing escapes the attention of inspector Pier Luigi (Gigi), a baffoonish local police officer in a sleepy backwater where nothing ever happens. All kitted out with his gun, handcuffs and truncheon the balding Gigi is desperate to see some action. Every incident – no matter how minor – gets a full investigation at the hands of this middle-aged meddler as he patrols the empty streets and byways, sneaking a cheeky cigarette, or occasionally flirting with young switchboard operator Paola (in his distinctive local accent) or shooting the breeze with some  colleague or passerby on the subject of sex, or some romantic hit on the radio.

But his plans to seduce Paola over a homemade risotto are suddenly derailed when a girl throws herself under a train – possibly due to sheer boredom. And this is not the first time. Facing this unexplainable suicide wave, Gigi starts investigating a strange world, between reality and fantasy, where a garden turns into a jungle and where a sleazy policeman’s prime focus is on investigating affairs of the heart.

After The Summer of Giacomo, winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno FilmFestival, Alessandro Comodin returns with a picaresque comic documentary inspiredly by the rhythmic dialectic poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini. MT

GOLDEN LEOPARD COMPETITION | LOCARNO 2022

Dir.: Stefan Jäger; Cast: Maresi Riegner, Max Hubacher, Julia Jentsch, Hannah Herzsprung, Philipp Hauß, Tina Distefano, Aline Distefano, Michael Finger; Germany/Switzerland/Italy 2021, 116 min.

A detailed and rather worthy biography of Austrian avantgarde photographer Hanna Leitner who left her husband and children in 1906 to join the artist colony in Monte Verità, Switzerland before pioneering a counter-cultural movement in Brazil with Henri Oedenkoven (Finger).

Swiss director Stefan Jäger directs Kornelija Narak’s two-handed narrative centring on Hanna’s time at the artist’s colony with flashbacks to her unhappy time in Viennese society at the end of the 19th century.

Marriage to a brutish and rather mediocre photographer Anton was thwarted by his competitiveness and poor bedroom skills, so leaving him for the free-spirited artist colony near Ascona offered release and a creative outlet for the highly-strung and straight-laced Hanna who found much of the behaviour there morally questionable, members often cavorting around in the nude.

Here she meets psychoanalyst and sexual predator Otto Gross, a mentor of Freud, who preys on his female patients (rather like Carl Jung whom he influenced) and falls into a sexual relationship with him while developing her photographic talents.

Life in the Monte Verita is by no means without incident: an exhibition of Leitner’s work is destroyed by fire, and her husband arrives in Ascona with their daughters Helene (T. Distefano) and Marie (A. Distefano) threatening to have her admitted to an asylum when she refuses to go home.

Isadora Duncan, Herman Hesse and the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam (who believed women should be confined to the kitchen) also make an appearance amid the frolicking band of artists who are clearly forerunners of the hippy culture of the 1960s.

Performances lack verve, the actors more suited to theatre than film. DoP Daniela Knapp’s images add flair but are rather on the idealistic side aptly reflecting Narak’s script which is all earnest and learned, but lacks dramatic heft. The whole undertaking is not so much inspired by rebellion, but by academic endeavour. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Dir.: Alexander Zelkovich; Cast: Tinatin Dalakisvili, Evgeniy Tsyganov, Evgwnii Kharitonov, Yotam Kushnir, Gay Kelly; Russia 2021, 139 min.

Georgian supermodel Tinatin Dalakisvili – who is constantly taking her clothes off – is the star of this Russian take on Medea a big screen bonkbuster brought down by a clumsy script: Zelkovich uses a confessional to drive the spare narrative forward, laced with some unintentionally awkward home-spun philosophies

Life for the chemistry graduate revolves around her family, kids Misha and Yulia, and their Jewish father Alexei (Tsyganov), a business man who spends most of the time with his lover Nadya and their child.

Keen to escape the strictures of this dual existence, Alexei decides to settle in Israel, and wants to take his lover and the two children with him. But his plans are put on hold by Nadya’s security service agent brother Valera (Kushnir), who has some dirt on Alexei, and wants a big pay-off before he lets his sister and Alexei go.

Valera makes a big mistake when he reveals his plan, and it will cost him his life. Meanwhile in Israel, Alexei soon tires of the mother of his children, falling for his blonde neighbour. But his lust for women doesn’t stop there. An affair with a graffiti artist (Kelly) is next, then a soldier (Kushnir) in the Israeli secret service, who wants to die for the country, will follow. The end is brilliantly executed (like many of the scenes), but the running time is far too generous for what little Zelkovich has to say.

This Medea is a wild opportunist: she endangers her children in a concrete silo, saves their lives when the police give chase to a terrorist, and sets fire to a model on a roof terrace  Overwhelming images drown out the threadbare narrative leaving us with eye candy. In trying to be mainstream, Zelkovich has squandered some good ideas. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Dir.: Qiu Jionqjiong; Cast: Yi Sicheng, Qiu Zhmin, Song Xuchun, Zhang Zivi; Hong Kong/France 2021, 179 min.

A New Old Play is the debut feature for Chinese writer/director Qui Jionqjiong, best known for his documentaries. A poetic journey through Chinese history in the turbulent years between 1920 to the mid Sixties, this in depth biopic mirrors the tumultuous career of legendary Hong Kong actor and clown Qui Fu (Yi Sicheng). 

Shot in exquisite, washed out colours, resembling paintings of the era by DoP Feng Yuchao ‘Robbin’, A New Old Play echoes – aesthetically and contents wise – Theo Angelopoulos’ 1975 feature The Travelling Players. It’s a complex, self-indulgent but gratifying piece of filmmaking that requires a grasp of modern Chinese history (and the language) to be fully appreciated: Reading subtitles for three hours while taking on board the film’s aesthetic delicacy and rich detail is quite a challenge.

Qui Fu (Yi Sicheng) is called to perform for the King of Hell (a poetic way of describing death), who has sent two guards to accompany him on his journey where Qui recalls his life. It’s 1920, during the last knockings of the Sichuan Dynasty, and army generals will seize political office in a bid to survive.

One of these generals is saved by barber Pocky (Qui Zhmin), who is freed up to found the Sichuan Opera School. The Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek are fighting the Communist forces under Mao Tso-Tung and Qui Fu, an orphaned victim of war and political unrest, is taken on by Pocky as a sort of court jester cum stooge.

After the Communist victory Qui joins a theatre group, the “Army of Culture” serving – as Mao dictates – workers, peasants and soldiers. The ‘Peoples’ Sichuan Theatre’ also agitates to keep citizens out of the Opium dens. But after Mao declares “The great Leap” forward with a rapid programme of industrialisation, the economy collapses, and people are literally left dying in the streets.

By this time Qui has already been married and his second wife (Zhang Zivi) is his own boss in the Propaganda Administration. After losing a baby daughter the couple adopt another child who they discover abandoned on the steps outside their home. Later the birth mother will reclaim the child, giving the pair a pumpkin as a reward. Joy comes with the birth of a son, Ah Hei (Xuchun), who will grows up to join Beijing’s Red Guards after Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” puts students in charge.

But Qui’s career then takes a downturn when is captured and imprisoned in a cowshed by the authorities who consider him an enemy of the people. Seizing the opportunity to her own advantage, his wife goes on stage to condemn her husband, but refuses to endorse the accusations against him, even though she is warned by the government: “Do not let marital relations obscure class contradictions.”

Pocky too, has fallen on hard times, hailed “a reactionary Warlord.” And while Ah Hei tries to make his way back to the capital on a flying broomstick, his father is released and will, when fully rehabilitated, play villains on the stage. Meanwhile Qui’s eventful career sees him once again on his way to Hell where he is brainwashed with a poisoned tea in a tragic denouement. A comprehensive look at the not so glamorous world of the Chinese theatre in the mid 20th century but not for the feint-hearted.

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE OF THE CITIES OF ASCONA AND LOSONE | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Writ/Dir: Lorenz Merz | Switzerland, Fantasy Drama 110

Impressionistic, overlong but strangely captivating Soul of a Beast is an inventive piece of visual storytelling. playing out as a stream of consciousness collage of feelings and sensations and set in and around an upbeat and summery Swiss setting that becomes increasingly apocalyptic.

With its retro Hollywood soundtrack, fashion-conscious freewheeling style and dreamy tonal wooziness this artfully involving close-up experience works well for a while in following the days of its loved-up characters: Corey (Ella Rumpf) and her lovers Joel (Tonatiuh Radzi) and Gabriel (Pablo Caprez) who is looking after his cute kid son and brother from the ditzy drunkard Zoe (Luna Wedler) who seems to have drowned in a sea of booze and fags. Her own mother (Lolita Chammah) is keeping an eye on proceedings from a distance. The slow-burning narrative succumbs to aimless longueurs in the second act as the feature dwindles into an imaginatively edited art installation finally building to a tense and violent denouement.

The focus here is the escape from the zoo of two Colombian pumas and a giraffe who are roaming the city wreaking havoc and sustaining and causing injury. As usual the authorities mishandle the crisis, and nature strikes back casting a spell over the central characters as they become vaguely feral and violently inhibited in response to the climate of hostility brought about by the ecological tragedy. Escape to the countryside with Jamie seems the only way out of the mayhem for the vulnerable Gabriel who becomes increasingly confused and is savagely beaten up by the previously blissed out Joel, jealous of his relationship with Corey.

Soul of a Beast is a striking creative compositional fantasy with a perplexing Japanese occasional narration that ultimately outstays its welcome. While brilliantly cinematic and daringly executed this kind of choppy editing is extremely tiring to watch for longer than an hour and a half. Please kill your darlings – less is always more. MT

Pardo for Best Actor
Mohamed Mellali and Valero Escolar for SIS DIES CORRENTS (The Odd-Job Men) by Neus Ballús, Spain

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Dir: Srdjan Dragojevic | Serbia/Croatia/Germany, Fantasy Drama 122′

Miracles colour the lives of Serbians in a post-communist society readapting to Christianity in writer-director Srdjan Dragojevic’s exuberant ‘Wild Eastern’ fantasy melodrama.

Inspired by three short stories from French novelist Marcel Ayme (1902-67), the director brings this visually resplendent, thematically provocative comedy to Locarno’s main competition lineup.

Communism and Christianity are still fighting it out in the post war God-fearing impoverished rural enclave in Serbia where people are bloody but indomitably unbowed, in the first segment of the trilogy. Gun-toting Strojan (Goran Navojec) and his wife Nada (Ksenija Marinkovic) are the combative main characters bolstered by their ebullient village neighbourhood where Strojan is cheating with his next-door neighbour,   stray dogs riffle through the rubbish and false teeth are still kept overnight in glasses like something out of the Sixties. Meanwhile inside the immaculately clean 1940s style town hall with its pristine marble tiling, civil rectitude still reigns supreme  But whatever he does Strojan can’t get rid of his halo or the vestiges of the past. Meanwhile, in the second narrative strand Gojko is an arch villain seething in prison, awaiting the death penalty when mysterious events may somehow offer him a surprising reprieve. The third story transports us to 2026 where an art gallery curator shows a painting portraying a poignant image of a stray dog which somehow reunites the locals in a collective sense of the healing power of animals.  

Heavens Above is a lively and imaginative snapshot of the Balkans in the post communist transition period between 1993 and the near future. Classically styled and vibrantly theatrical, it’s also a gut -punching reflection on the pros and cons of organised religion and political coercion with its ethical and moral strictures, and how they impinge on real life in all its decadent glory reminding us of where we should be heading in this brave new post Covid era. The characters are all convincingly bonkers, but you can’t help but like them. Susan Joksimovic does wonders with his special effects seamlessly dovetailing the surreal into the mundane. Dragojevic certainly has a talent to amuse giving us plenty of bang for our bucks in this incendiary feature. MT

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Dir.: Samuel Barbosa; Documentary with Paulo Rocha, Manoel de Oliveira, Isabel Ruth, Marcia Briea; Portugal 2021, 94 min.

Samuel Barbarossa makes his feature debut here as director with this enlightening biopic raising the profile of Portuguese “Cine Nova” director Paulo Rocha (1935-2012) who blazed a trail with his brand of neo-realism in the Sixties and was later known for his rigorously classical films, although sadly neither found much of an audience outside his native Portugal (unlike the more illustrious Manoel de Oliveira – who also gets a look in here with a short interview).

Rocha grew up in Oporto where his close bond with his mother appears to have affected his emotional relationships with other women. After studying Law at the behest of his father, he soon turned to filmmaking enrolling at the famous famous IDHEC (Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographique) in Paris, where like many directors before and since he claims to have learnt more from “watching the films of Jean Renoir and Kenzo Mizoguchi than from his academic studies”.

Rocha idealised other male artists such as Manoel de Oliveira, setting him a monument in film with “Cinema de Notre Temps: “Oliveira – L”Architecte” (1993). Another obsession was his fascination with Japan, where he lived for a while. Again, his love of the country is crystalised in a male “Super Ego”: Wenceslau Moraes (1854-1929) to whom Rocha dedicated his 1982 feature A IIha dos Amores. It took him fourteen years to finish the feature set in Japan, not filming anything for over ten years. Rocha abandoned neo-realism and melodrama for a formal, classicist aesthetic. O Desejado(1988), adapted from “Tale of Genji” by the classical author Shikibu, is set in contemporary Portugal, but very much faithful to the original text.

Like Godard (Barbosa has named the production company for his documentary Bando à Parte) Rocha taking his inspiration from newspaper articles. Isabel Ruth and Marcia Briea, who starred in many of Rocha’s features, reports that Rocha went first on location hunting, before he thought about the narrative. “The story grows whilst I visit the locations.”

DoP Jorge Quintela deftly interweaves ‘Talking Heads’ enlivened by informative clips from Rocha’s oeuvre, Barbosa offering a balanced view of the director’s contribution and whetting our appetite to discover more about Rocha’s role in Portuguese Cinema, which has been overly dominated by Manoel De Oliveira. AS 

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL

Dir: Ghassan Salhab | Fantasy Drama, 101’

This distinctive existential feature from veteran arthouse filmmaker Ghassan Salhab has a stillness and a slow-burn sense of beauty that relies on sound and atmosphere to convey an enigmatic storyline that holds our attention for a while but is ultimately unsatisfying in the long run.

Essentially a two-hander, beguilingly captured in a series of elegantly framed cinematic long takes the film unfolds in the bosky autumnal settings in the Lebanese mountains where two characters appear trapped in an offscreen war zone that echoes around them as they share an enigmatic almost monosyllabic rapport punctuated by the threat of impending danger. Sudden raucous sound bites puncture the peaceful emptiness of the landscape and the river that runs through it – helicopters buzz overhead, along with occasional bomb blasts.

Clearly Hassan (Ali Suliman) and his girlfriend (Yumna Marwan) feel unsettled as they explore the rocky terrain and a palpable sense of tension gradually builds driven forward by the film’s glowering electronic soundscape, danger seems to emanate from deep underground, where some kind of atavistic force connected to the earth’s core signifies that nature is rebelling against man’s onslaught on its domain.

Yumna Marwan is a hypnotic presence and her feral magnetism captives Hassan. But rather than being put off by their impending danger, it actually fires up their ardour for each other in a physically satisfying encounter that dissipates the tension, for a while at least, as the two explore how their relationship seemed to exist long before they even met. But this encouraging idea is never really develops and the film drifts self-indulgently towards an aimless final half hour. Could The River be a metaphor for the garden of Eden corrupted by man’s onslaught on nature? Salhab leaves his story open to interpretation, but while the film all looks beguiling it doesn’t really reach a conclusion.

In his Cannes Jury Prize winning film Memoria, Apichatpong Weerasethakul takes his time to create an almost parallel universe using sound and atmosphere to convey a potent earthly force reacting to man’s hostile intervention on the earth. But his film language is far richer conveying a deep yet serenely meditative resonance with its far-reaching themes about man’s connection with nature and the spiritual world.

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | In competition | 14.00 on 5 Aug

Dir: Neus Ballus | Cast: Mohamed Mellali, Oriol Cervera, Valero Escolar, Pep Sarra | Catalan, Comedy Drama, 82’

Exposing deep seated xenophobia with wry humour this comedy drama set in and around the leafy environs of Barcelona takes a fresh and light=hearted look at the world of handymen in Spain’s Cataluna.

Pep and his colleague Valero (Escolar) are put out when a new member joins their team in the shape of Moroccan electrician Mohamed (Mellali). In barely disguised irritation Valero grudgingly complains to his boss but she insists so the three get down to work amid much moaning, Valero determined not to like Moh from day one, as the story follows them through an average week. Not that Moh fares any better with his Moroccan flat mates who are equally racist, mocking the Catalan languages and resenting Moh’s keenness make a better life for himself

Being a handyman to the general public often brings with it an ancillary duty of care which is part of the job and Moh – who has an intelligent grasp of things and is doing well in his Catalan classes – is particularly understanding in this regard accepting that older people are often lonely and need to express themselves – the 100 year old health fanatic is a point in question with his savage mistrust of today’s dietary additives.

Then there’s the naughty little girls who lock the workers out of the  house where they trying to upgrade the lightening system, or the Catalan speaking photographer who needs her air–conditioner fixing, Valero using the opportunity to gauchely chat up her models while giving poor Mohamed impromptu dating tips in the process. Moh actually lucks out with the prospect of a lucrative opportunity to pose in adverts with his soulful looks and bristling pecs looking rather like Blazing Saddles’ Cleavon Little). Needless to say the portly Valero is not impressed – realising – clearly he needs to lose weight.

With its naturalistic performances this sharply observational comedy mines a rich vein of humour in consumer bleats and rants about the good old days, shoddy modern workmanship and the downsides of retirement, Pep and Valero by no means always seeing eye to eye but getting with it all the same until they fall out big time.

As the week progresses Dramatic heft comes during  a job for a psychiatrist who manages to get Valero into a full scale argument when asking about the ‘quality’ of his working relationship’ with Moh. Neus provides and entertaining and often ludicrous snapshot of multiculturalism in full swing in modern day Spain. MT

Pardo for Best Actor
Mohamed Mellali and Valero Escolar for SIS DIES CORRENTS (The Odd-Job Men) by Neus Ballús, Spain

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Dir.: Rob Jabbaz; Cast: Berant Zhu, Regina Lei, Tzu-Chiang Wang, Apple Chen; Taiwan, Horror, 99 min.

In his blood-strewn, scare-mongering first feature Rob Jabbaz imagines a hyper-violent-pandemic re-surging through an exhausted Taiwan as a couple try in vain to find other.

In Taipei, Kat (Lei) and Jim (Zhu) have fallen out over holiday plans to escape the first wave of viral mayhem. They desperately need time out when the Alvin virus is finally under control after a year when the effects on humans were relatively benign. But it’s election year, and the president has relaxed all precautions. The result is total chaos and the male population inexplicably lose their self control in a rampage of murder and rape.

In the tube on her way to work, Kat is accosted by a smart but infected business man (Wang) who morphs into a maniac, poking passenger Molly in the eye, Kat conveying her briskly to the NTU hospital, where the Casualty is predictably closed. Hot on their heels the business man manages to get hold of Molly while a doctor explains to Kat about a weird imbalance of the limbic system responsible for the outbreak of violence. Jim has also been assaulted by a neighbour and wonders whether he will survive the encounter without being infected.

Certainly one for horror fans, The Sadness delivers handsomely on the gore front with graphic images that leave nothing to the imagination. But cleverly Jabbaz always has a rationale at hand, suggesting that this brutality amongst the male population has just been dormant, waiting for the opportunity to erupt. A startling finale brings matters to a satisfying conclusion. Unbridled violence, then, but not of the mindless gratuitous kind. AS

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Dir: Francesco Montagner | Italy drama 97’

Brotherhood is a male-centric cinema verite portrait that sees religious and paternal dominance colliding with the present in a close-knit Bosnian rural community. Screening in the Filmmakers of the Present competition at thus year’s Locarno Film Festival, this is an impressive feature debut for documentarian Francesco Montagner .

Montagner and his DoP create a real sense of remoteness in the lush bucolic landscapes of deepest Bosnia where the family raise sheep, discuss Islam and still bitterly remember the Serbian conflict. Were it not for their mobile phones it would be difficult to believe that shepherd brothers Jabir, Usama, Useir lived in the modern day. Their traditional farmstead seems cut off from civilisation and their strict Muslim father keeps a draconian control over their lives with a regime of daily prayers. But when he is convicted of a religious crime that will take him away from the family for several years, the three brothers must take over and the family dynamic shifts dramatically with unexpected consequences.

Life carries on as normal for a while as the boys tend to their livestock, the youngest becoming increasingly difficult to handle. The world of Islam is never far away on the internet, and during the long winter evenings by the fire they discuss their faith and download live footage encouraging them to rise up against ‘the infidel’, Islam encroaching on their collective consciousness. Naturally school work and studying runs contrary to everyday life as shepherds, particularly when seeing off wolves seems more important than passing exams. But without their strict father figure to keep them under the cosh, their existence is increasingly threatened. Beautifully captured by Prokop Soucek’s sensitive camera, this is a revealing look at traditional rural life in an Islamic household, even if the ending is rather simplistic. MT

PARDO D’ORO – Cineasti del Presente LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Dir: Axelle Robert | France, Drama

Petite Solange is a heart-breaking coming-of-age story that desperately wants to be liked. It’s the feature debut of writer and director Axelle Robert Set in Nantes, the feature is slow to develop, and any dramatic developments are far and few between – in spite of a heart breaking story.

Guitar shop owner Antoine (Katerine) and his wife Aurelia (Drucker), an actress, have set their sights set on new horizons after a marriage of twenty years: Antoine has fallen for his attractive assistant Gina (Astor), and Aurelia is seeing another man carefully watched over by her thirteen-year old daughter Solange (Springer), and her brooding twenty-year old brother Romain (Montana-Haroche), who gets all the parental attention.

The divorce means the kids will lose the home they grew up in, and little Solange is not even part of the decision as to where she will live. A loner by nature, does not get much help from her girlfriend Lili (Léon), or distant love-interest Arthur (Ferreira), who is more interested in getting a bargain instrument from Antoine, than in his daughter. Solange is so upset about losing her home she actually tries to commit suicide but her life is saved by cool, intellectually overbearing psychiatrist in the hospital, and she eventually goes home.

Jade Springer gives a memorable performance as Solange in whose unforgettable face and soulful eyes the cruelties of the adult world are reflected. Whilst Axelle Robert quotes Verlaine, she fails to capture the spirit of her compatriots rather maudlin poetry. Instead she ends up with a film that lacks analytical depths or emotional empathy. AS

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

Dir.: Hleb Papou; Cast: Germano Gentile, Maurizio Bousso, Marco Falaguasta, Sabina Guzzanti; Italy/France 2021, 82 min.

Il Legionario is a first feature for Belorussian born director/co-writer Hleb Papou who fleshes out a simplistic narrative from his award-winning Cannes short film of the same name centring on brothers Daniel and Patrick, of African parentage. Daniel is a policeman with Rome’s Riot Police, Patrick the gang-leader of a group of squatters in a building due for ‘clearance’ by Daniel’s unit.

The director’s sympathy clearly lies with Patrick (Bousso) and his cause, Daniel (Gentile) appears to be on the wrong side of the conflict. Daniel’s wife Tricia is pregnant; the fact that she is white makes Daniel’s position even more complex. The squad leader of his unit is a man called ‘Aquila’ (Falaguasta), who meets with right-wing extremists and expects Daniel to obey his orders when it comes to repossessing the block of flat from the 150 occupiers, who have been offered accommodation in Milano, which they refused. Patrick and Daniel’s mother tries in vain to reconcile the brothers, but in the end, she sides with Patrick, not wanting to leaver her own flat in the block. The fight is bloody, and Patrick threatens to throw himself from the roof. For Daniel, with ‘Aquila’ watching, there will be no more comprises.

Impressive flight scenes between the police and protestors make this a gritty action drama: Gentile’s Daniel is convincing as a man who hesitates, until it is too late. Patrick is a head banger, but still tells his son, that Daniel is one of them, acting as a spy. Passionate and visually spectacular, Papou weaves a violent tapestry, where everyone is caught up in a battle nobody can win. AS

Best Emerging Director Award of the City and Region of Locarno | LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021

New artistic director Giona A Nazzaro unveils his first mix of films for the 74th Locarno Film Festival which runs from 4 until 14 August in its luxurious Swiss lakeside location. Locarno is known for its edgy profile and this year will be no different: Films by established auteurs: Abel Ferrara,  and Bertrand Mandico will screen alongside an inventive array of undiscovered newcomers in a selection that embraces traditional stories and more experimental avantgarde fare. 17 films from 12 countries having their world premiere in the international competition which promises, as ever, to be eclectic and daring.

Late additions to the party are world premieres: SHE WILL a Scottish-set psychological drama from Franco-British director Charlotte Colbert that centres on a mastectomy and stars Alice Krige, Rupert Everett and Malcolm McDowell, and 100 MINUTES the latest from veteran Russian director Gleb Paniflov who won the Golden Leopard in 1969 and the Golden Bear in 1987. The film’s focus is Alexandr Solzhenitzyn’s literary hero Ivan Denisov Shukhov, in a book that would win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The international competition jury comprises US filmmakers Eliza Hittmann and Kevin Jerome Everson, Italian actress Isabella Ferrari, director Philippe Lacote from Ivory Coast, and Portuguese actress Leonor Silveira.

Abel Ferrara’s espionage thriller Zeros And Ones stars Ethan Hawke as an American soldier caught up in an explosion at the Vatican. Srdjan Dragojević’s dark comedy Heavens Above explores the impact of miracles on the lives of three Serbians. Cop Secret is a sexually charged crime caper from Icelandic director Hannes Tor Halldórsson (who also plays in goal for his national football team and saved Lionel Messi’s penalty at the World Cup in 2018). Award-winning Indonesian director Edwin joins the main competition line-up with a comedy satire that sets nature against our macho world: Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash.

The festival’s Filmmakers of the Present strand welcomes a variety of international filmmakers with premieres from Philippines, Chile, Mexico, Tunisia as well as Western Europe.

The star of the show is the massive outdoor venue that is Piazza Grande – seating up to 7500 – the fun will start with Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Beckett, Oscar winner Stefan Ruzowitzky’s Hinterland, and US director John Swab’s crime  Ida Red, starring Melissa Leo, Frank Grillo and Josh Hartnett.

Concorso internazionale 2021

After Blue (Fr)
Dir Bertrand Mandico

Al Naher (Leb/Fr/Ger/Qat)
Dir Ghassan Salhab

Espiritu Sagrado (Sp/Fr/Tur)
Dir Chema Garcia ibarra

Gerda (Rus)
Dir Natalya Kudryashova

I Giganti (It)
Dir Bonifacio Angius

A New Old Play (HK/Fr)
Dir QIU Jiongjiong

Juju Stories (Nig/Fr)
Dirs C.J. “Fiery” Obasi, Abba T. Makama, Michael Omonua

La Place d’une Autre (Fr)
Dir Aurelia Georges

Cop Secret (Ice)
Dir Hannes Tor Halldórsson

Luzifer (Aust)
Dir Peter Brunner

Medea (Rus)
Dir Alexander Zeldovich

Heavens Above (Serb/Ger/North Mac/Slo/Cro/Mont/Bos)
Dir Srdjan Dragojević

Petite Solange (Fr)
Dir Axelle Ropert

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (Indonesia/Sing/Ger)
Dir Edwin

The Odd-Job Men (Sp)
Dir Neus Ballus

Soul Of A Beast (Switz)
Dir Lorenz Merz

Zeros And Ones (It/Ger/USA)
Dir Abel Ferrara

Concorso Cineasti del presente 2021

Actual People (USA)
Dir Kit Zauhar

Holy Emy (Gr/Fr/USA)
Dir Araceli Lemos

Public Toilet Africa (Ghana)
Dir Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah

Brotherhood (Czech/It)
Dir Francesco Montagner

Virgin Blue (China)
Dir NIU Xiaoyu

Il Legionario (It/Fr)
Dir Hleb Papou

Whether The Weather Is Fine
Dir Carlo Francisco Manatad

L’Ete L’Eternite (Fr)
Dir Emilie Aussel

Mis Hermanos Suenan Despiertos (Chile)
Dir Claudia Huaiquimilla

Mostro (Mex)
Dir Jose Pablo Escamilla

Niemand ist bei den Kälbern (Ger)
Dir Sabrina Sarabi

Shankar’s Fairies (Ind)
Dir Irfana Majumdar

Streams (Tun/Lux/Fr)
Dir Mehdi Hmili

Wet Sand (Switz/Geo)
Dir Elene Naveriani

Zahori (Switz/Arg/Chile/Fr)
Dir Mari Alessandrini

Piazza Grande 2021

Beckett (It)
Dir Ferdinando Cito Filomarino

Free Guy (USA)
Dir Shawn Levy

Heat (USA)
Dir Michael Mann

Hinterland (Aust/Lux)
Dir Stefan Ruzowitzky

Ida Red (USA)
Dir John Swab

Monte Verita (Switz/Aust/Ger)
Dir Stefan Jager

National Lampoon’s Animal House (USA)
Dir John Landis

Respect (Canada/USA)
Dir Liesl Tommy

Rose (Fr)
Dir Aurelie Saada

Sing-Keu-Hol (Sinkhole) (South Korea)
Dir KIM Ji-hoon

The Alleys (Jor/Egy/Saudi Arabia/Qat)
Dir Bassel Ghandour

The Terminator (USA/UK)
Dir James Cameron

Vortex (Fr/Bel/Mon)
Dir Gaspar Noe

The Walking Liberty (It)
Dir Alessandro Rak

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL 2021 | 4 -14 AUGUST 2021