Dir: Alaeddine Slim | Tunisia, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar · 2024 · DCP 2K · Color · 102′ · o.v. Arabic

A woman emerges from the sea. A shepherd disappears from the hillside in a remote Tunisian coastal town. Local cop Fathi investigates the bizarre events in this arthouse thriller from Alaeddine Slim who melds murder mystery and surreal sci-fi in Agora, a mesmerising follow-up to his award-winning feature debut Tlamess

In the abattoir three macabre corpses await the mortician. Blood seeps from their bodies. Piecing together local gossip Fathi finds out they are victims of a brawl in a massive tanker moored in the port. But the search for shepherd Mabrouk in the bosky backwater reveals no clues.

In his pre-apocalyptic portrait the Tunisian filmmaker makes evocative use of the hostile surroundings: decrepit buildings, contaminated seawater, a dead crow. Rotten veg and putrid fish in the market all bear testament to a failed harvest. The sea is throwing out its dead. Stray dogs are sickening and dying in the creeping malaise.  

Then Detective Omar Walli, from Tunis section 19, arrives in town to oversee the investigation and contain the damage. But nobody feels comfortable with his sinister presence. “You can’t trust people from the capital”. says a man in the bar. Indeed. In the privacy of his hotel bedroom Omar defers to a bald, cancer-stricken woman who uses a voice box to issue her instructions. 

The slow-burn police procedural is laced with fantasy sci-fi elements serves as a metaphor for global unease. Man has destroyed the environment and the earth is screaming in pain. Police and politicians are corrupt and under the cosh of an enigmatic big brother. Intertitles threaten dire warnings. “No one will be spared!” Meanwhile the mosques spew out a stentorious message that God is great. 

A seething soundscape combines ambient sounds of thunder and an inventive electronic score. Neon-infused colours evoke a toxic environment where decay and degradation is endemic. One terrific scene sees birds flying frantically in all directions to escape the farmer’s poisonous fumigation.

The deaths remain unsolved but behind closed doors Omar and his female sidekick pander to an enigmatic cabal with gleaming neon blue eyes and white socks. Sounds weird but it works in this strikingly unusual fantasy thriller from the talented Tunisian auteur, screening in competition at this year’s 77th Locarno Film Festival. @Meredith Taylor

PARDO VERDE AWARD | LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir/Wri: Saule Bliuvate | Lithuania · 2024 · DCP 4K · Color · 99′ · o.v. Lithuanian

Teenage girls in the changing rooms. A scuffle breaks out. Against a back drop of Soviet Brutalist buildings a girl plays basket ball with the men of the village. Marija is a tomboy. And new to the village. Staying with her grandma, a flower seller, she has to make friends. But how when they disdain you and steal your jeans?

Lithuania’s Saule Bliuvate draws on her own experience in this feature debut, an artful snapshot of a Lithuanian backwater where the mundane melts into the surreal. Marija makes a friend. Two girls at a loose end dream of escaping from the dour reality of their dingy domesticity to the glamour of a new world where anything is possible – if your face and body fits. They will do anything to get taller, slimmer, rangier, even if it involves taking tapeworm tablets to get ‘the look’.

Every three years a model agent visits the village looking for fresh young faces to work in the model industry. Talk of New York, Paris, and Tokyo where life is an endless party and everything is free. So much to discover. Tall and slim with an androgynous look Marija is a big hit in the casting call. 

Bliuvate abandons a straightforward narrative to paint and impressionist picture that lingers in short cinematic scenes capturing this post soviet dystopia set amongst a disoriented youth where young girls are reduced to passive victims who offer themselves up to all kinds of abuse to find a life they think might be better. Meanwhile back home the older generation are discovering new things too.

Acid green landscapes zinging with Spring vegetation contrast with the grunge of dilapidated huts, mangled cars, a sordid environment. Young bodies entwine with each other as they explore and discover their sexuality. Naivity meets experience in this poignant and picaresque picture of emerging youth. @Meredith Taylor 

The Pardo d’Oro winner Akiplėša (Toxic) LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Virgil Vernier | France 2024 77′

100,000,000,000,000 the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Director and writer Virgil Vernier is one of the singular new voices in French cinema whose work blends fiction, documentary and myth.

His look at grifters on the Cote d’Azur carries an unsettling message from China but ultimately overstays its welcome at just over an hour with some superficial scenes and a confusing opening.

Essentially a three-hander this narrative documentary drifts along aimlessly offering snapshots of the scuzzy characters inhabiting its glitzy location of Monaco: a male mixed heritage sex worker, a Serbian ‘stone healer’ and the 12 year old daughter of Chinese immigrants purportedly building their island to escape the threat of a forthcoming apocalypse.

Anyone can carve a niche for themselves in a place where there is money to burn and people who want to burn it. Vernier’s third feature aims to give a voice to his drifters but only skims the surface of their empty lives. There is nothing appealing or vulnerable about this trio to help us feel sympathy or engage with them particularly the male prostitute who has a high opinion of himself for no apparent reason and regards his clients with scorn. At least the Serbian woman Vesna is trying to find herself and make a better life. Vacuous like the characters and location they inhabit. A lost opportunity to make us engage with their plight and understand their motivations @Meredith Taylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Dir: Juri Rechinsky | Austria Doc 93′

48,359 Russians have so far lost their lives since Russia invaded the Ukraine in February 2022. Meanwhile on the other side of the conflict a lonely old woman gathers her things. She’s chosen to stay in her building. Her son leaves her with a final kiss.

English air workers Elizabeth and Jonny, from British Expeditionary Aid and Rescue, are on a mission to care for Ukraine’s ageing and infirm – some are blind, some crippled – and to keep them relatively safe from danger, and identity the dead. They present the new face of the burgeoning aid effort.

Austrian auteur Juri Rechinsky turns his artful camera on the survivors – mostly women with babies and young children. These are the forgotten people. Philosophical and positive the old look on the bright side. Cheering each other up. “I nearly died nine times down the mines. It wasn’t my destiny. Who knows what my fate will be”.

Then there are the volunteers. Bringing up the bodies. A jaw, a skull. The back of a head. A gold ring and a bracelet stuffed into a bag and stuck with a note on the white plastic covering. People with children wait in the station, wondering where to go. This is the messy side of war, if ever there was one clean one. Far away from the front lines. Where is the glory here?.

How can you make an arthouse film about death, mud and broken bodies?. This one manages to see the beauty in the beastly. A burning sunset. An ambulance chasing along to the mortuary in the frosty light of dawn. The camera records the intimate details. It captures the physical effort of carrying dead bodies, forcing them into body bags and slipping those into coffins. Form filling. Endless cataloguing. Finding order in chaos. Old ladies having their hair styled by a coiffeur eager to offer his services. No one needs hairdressers now.

The voyeuristic camera takes us into the mortuary to watch as relatives grief in their jagged sorrow. People kneeling along the roadside to honour the dead. Rechinsky keeps his distance from this grim subject but there is dark humour too, especially for the old ones who take a measured view of war and suffering. Impossible not to shed a tear. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | CRITICS’ WEEK

Dir: Tato kotatishvilli | Georgia, Netherlands · 2024 · DCP 2K · Color · 95′ · o.v. Georgian

After a family funeral young Gonga and his cousin Bart, a sort of Georgian Laurel and Hardy combo, find a suitcase full of rusty crosses in a scrapyard, Bart gets the idea to turn them into neon crucifixes and sell them door-to-door to the gullible inhabitants of Tbilisi.

After spraying the crossed they spend the night in their van only to be woken the next morning by a Roma coffee seller and enjoy a breakfast of fruit and bread. Passers by then offer them marketing tips to sell their wares

Following a chronicle three act progression the two finally manage to make abit of money and toast their friends to a long life with “plenty of eating drinking and fucking” until Bart makes a fatal mistake that provides the piece with a minor dramatic twist.

In their eventful crusade through the suburbs of the city the director captures the essence of his hometown Tbilisi through a series of moving tableaux.  Holy Electricity is as much a travelogue as a demonstration of how Georgians forge love and friendship through this story of Gonga and Bart. Listening to Tbilisi’s music, absorbing its colours and textures, feeling its mood and capturing the zeitgeist.

We meet the famous stray dogs their ears tagged to demonstrate their vaccinated status and fed by passers-by, and a community of cats, a beggar singing got his supper reveals the poignancy of a nation where the poor are really pool (not just professionals out to make a buck). 

Hospitals work well here too even for the animals – both Gonga and a pet dog find themselves bandaged up after minor broken bones.  We hear the famous male singers joining together over a meal of Georgian cuisine including the famous khachapuri we experience the vastness of the capital nestling in a bowl in the surrounding countryside. But the overall impression is if calm and tolerance. Tato says his chilled narrative with documentary elements manages ‘To embrace my fellow citizens and accept them as they are: crazy, lovely, eccentric to outsiders eyes. ©️MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL |  Golden Leopard | CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE 2024

Dir: Mar Coll | Spain, drama 110’

Ever thought of killing someone dear to you? Mar Coll is a Goya awarded Catalan filmmaker competing in this year’s Golden Leopard competition and her latest feature Salve Maria certainly presents a convincing portrait of a woman on the edge with murder in mind .

Based on a novel by Basque writer Katixa Agirre it follows Maria a new mother struggling with her baby: the breastfeeding, the gruelling tiredness; the constant grizzling are all getting her down. And you really feel for her. So when she hears about the case of a French mother, accused of murdering her infant twins, Maria is shocked but not altogether surprised.

Maria becomes increasingly obsessed by this terrible crime and begins to fantasise about her own stressful situation until the idea of killing seems less outlandish than she originally thought. A grave orchestral score strikes the sombre mood lifting this domestic thriller elevating into much darker territory despite a rather underwhelming denouement. @MeredithTaylor

LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL | INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION