And while the event itself didn’t stray too far from the usual proceedings, Hoffmann did hint at major future developments, with the suggestion that perhaps Locarno could move its dates from its usual August slot to a different window (presumably mid-July). The topic will be up for discussion in the coming months, although, as explained to local media by Vice President Luigi Pedrazzini, any such shift would not be implemented before 2028.

One transformation has already occurred, with some grumblings from Swiss press on social media. It is the disproportionate predominance of English across all communication channels, including the festival’s in-house daily magazine, the newly rebranded Pardo. While this certainly highlights the event’s international nature, Locarno’s success is also deeply rooted in local Ticinese culture, along with the use of the national languages like Italian and, to some extent, French, whose apparent sidelining is a justifiable cause for concern.

And yet, despite the linguistic imbalance, when it came to the films themselves, English was largely absent from the official selection, with a notable lack of big American studio releases in Piazza Grande. Presumably this was a dual side effect of last year’s strikes and an unfavorable release calendar, as the Hollywood giants are famously reluctant to use the Piazza for world premieres. In the end, there was more independent fare in the competitions. As the artistic director Giona Nazzaro explained in interviews, it’s hard to get smaller American movies to debut in the competitive sections when Sundance exists.

Then again, the Columbia Pictures centenary retrospective, brilliantly curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, offered everyone the required dose of studio fare, with its 44-title overview of the company’s output during its so-called Golden Age (1929-1959), a healthy mix of classics and underseen gems that filled the seats in the GranRex screening venue on a regular basis. The same venue also hosted a sold-out screening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, lovingly introduced by its sound designer Ben Burtt, whose name warranted applause during the closing credits.

The main competition included big names and established directors like Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, but when it came time for the awards, the official jury was primarily impressed by younger talents. In particular, there was a double whammy coming from Lithuania: the teen model drama/horror Toxic won the Golden Leopard as well as the Best First Feature prize from a separate jury, and the family drama Drowning Dry won Best Director and Best Performance, the latter shared by all four lead actors. The Jury Prize went to Kurdwin Ayub for Mond, highlighting, alongside Toxic’s Saulé Bliuvaité, the vision and skill of a new generation of women in film.

This was also reflected in the public’s response to the Piazza offerings, with the Audience Award going to Reinas, the third feature by Peruvian-born Swiss director Klaudia Reynicke. Latin America was also at the center of the documentary Gaucho Gaucho, which received the inaugural Letterboxd Piazza Grande Award, replacing the previous critics’ prize voted for by Variety reviewers.

Other new initiatives like partnerships with Letterboxd and, since 2020, MUBI advanced the festival’s post-pandemic strategy to connect with cinephiles worldwide, beyond the scope of the eleven days of the even, and giving film buffs a taste of the red carpet from afar.

Some may have scoffed at the idea of having Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan as a guest of honor, given his relative lack of fame in Switzerland, but the social media videos featuring him were the only ones to consistently have four-figure views, with comments emphasizing how much India’s moviegoing community – one of the largest in the world – was enjoying the attention from an A-list festival of Locarno’s caliber.

Of course, for all the festival’s online expansion, the key element remained the shared cinematic experience on the ground. The final press release mentioned an increase in attendance compared to 2023, suggesting the festival is progressively regaining the viewers it lost during the global health crisis (the Piazza alone had a 23% increase during the first week). In spite of all the changes, including the opening animation featuring the leopard mascot, Locarno regulars and newcomers all agree with what has become the event’s official motto in the Nazzaro era: Cinema Forever.

Pardo d’Oro – Grand Prize of the Festival and City of Locarno
AKIPLEŠA (TOXIC)
by Saulé Bliuvaité, Lithuania

Special Jury Prize – Cities of Ascona and Losone
MOND
by Kurdwin Ayub, Austria

Pardo for Best Direction – City and Region of Locarno
to Laurynas Bareiša
for SESES (DROWNING DRY), Lithuania/Latvia

Pardo for Best Performance
to Gelmine Glemžaite, Agne Kaktaite, Giedrius Kiela, Paulius Markevicius
for SESES (DROWNING DRY) by Laurynas Bareiša, Lithuania/Latvia

Pardo for Best Performance
to Kim Minhee for SUYOOCHEON (BY THE STREAM)
by Hong Sangsoo, South Korea

Special Mentions
QING CHUN (KU) (YOUTH (HARD TIMES))
by WANG Bing, France/Luxembourg/Netherlands

SALVE MARIA
by Mar Coll, Spain

Concorso Cineasti del Presente

Pardo d’Oro – Concorso Cineasti del Presente
HOLY ELECTRICITY
by Tato Kotetishvili, Georgia/Netherlands

Best Emerging Director Award – City and Region of Locarno
to Denise Fernandes
for HANAMI, Switzerland/Portugal/Cape Verde

Special Jury Prize CINÉ+
KOUTÉ VWA (LISTEN TO THE VOICES)
by Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Belgium/France/French Guiana

Pardo for Best Performance
to Callie Hernandez
for INVENTION by Courtney Stephens, USA
Pardo for Best Performance
to Anna Mészöly
for FEKETE PONT (LESSON LEARNED) by Bálint Szimler, Hungary

Special Mentions
FEKETE PONT (LESSON LEARNED)
by Bálint Szimler, Hungary

KADA JE ZAZVONIO TELEFON (WHEN THE PHONE RANG)
by Iva Radivojevic, Serbia/USA

Pardi di Domani — Short Films

Pardino d’Oro Swiss Life for the Best Auteur Short Film
UPSHOT
by Maha Haj, Palestine/Italy/France

Special Mention
GWE-IN ESI JEONGCHE (THE MASKED MONSTER)
by Syeyoung Park, South Korea

Locarno Film Festival Short Film Candidate – European Film Awards
LA FILLE QUI EXPLOSE
by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, France

Concorso Internazionale

Pardino d’Oro SRG SSR for the Best International Short Film
WASHHH
by Mickey Lai, Malaysia/Ireland

 Pardino d’Argento SRG SSR for the International Competition
GIMN CHUME (HYMN OF THE PLAGUE)
by Ataka51, Germany/Russia

Pardi di Domani Best Direction Award – BONALUMI Engineering
QUE TE VAYA BONITO, RICO
by Joel Alfonso Vargas, United Kingdom/USA

Medien Patent Verwaltung AG Award
THE FORM
by Melika Pazouki, Iran

Special Mention
FREAK
by Claire Barnett, USA

Concorso Nazionale

Pardino d’Oro Swiss Life for the Best Swiss Short Film
SANS VOIX
by Samuel Patthey, Switzerland

Pardino d’Argento Swiss Life for the National Competition
BETTER NOT KILL THE GROOVE
by Jonathan Leggett, Switzerland

Best Swiss Newcomer Award
to Gabriel Grosclaude
for LUX CARNE, Switzerland

Special Mention
PROGRESS MINING
by Gabriel Böhmer, United Kingdom/Switzerland

First Feature

Swatch First Feature Award
AKIPL?ŠA (TOXIC)
by Saul? Bliuvait?, Lithuania

MUBI Award – Debut Feature
GREEN LINE
by Sylvie Ballyot, France/Lebanon/Qatar

Special Mentions
HANAMI
by Denise Fernandes, Switzerland/Portugal/Cape Verde

KOUTÉ VWA (LISTEN TO THE VOICES)
by Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Belgium/France/French Guiana

Pardo Verde
supported by the Ente Regionale per lo Sviluppo del Locarnese e Vallemaggia

Pardo Verde
AGORA
by Ala Eddine Slim, Tunisia/France/Saudi Arabia/Qatar

Special Mentions
DER FLECK
by Willy Hans, Germany/Switzerland

REVOLVING ROUNDS
by Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik, Austria

Based on the novel of the same name by Maria Pia Veladiano, the movie revolves around a wealthy family in city of Vicenza, in the Veneto region of Italy. Maria (Valentina Bellè) is about to give birth, but her elation is short-lived when she discovers her daughter, Rebecca, was born with a large red mark on her face. While her husband (Paolo Pierobon) and sister-in-law (Sonia Bergamasco) treat the baby with varying degrees of affection, Maria actively shuns her, leading to the living situation described by the English title (the original La vita accanto is more suggestive, as it translates as “the life next door”).

As she grows up, Rebecca learns to find solace in music, and it is here that Giordana unveils his most inspired creative choice, with the casting of Beatrice Barison as the adult version of the character (the 10-year old Rebecca is played by noted child actress Sara Ciocca). A pianist by training and trade, Barison was chosen, despite her lack of acting experience, because the filmmaker wanted the diegetic music to be performed live on set without having to resort to the usual editing tricks to make the actors look like seasoned masters of notes.

That strategy, paired with Barison’s passion and rawness, lends the film its most potent dramatic tension, particularly as the original score, composed by Dario Marianelli, is generally subdued in order to highlight Rebecca’s blossoming as a great talent, despite the lingering feeling of inadequacy tied to her relationship with her mother (a topic that inspired Giordana to dedicate the movie to the late Chantal Akerman, whose filmmaking had a profound impact on him as a young cinephile).

While one might ponder what Bellocchio would have done with the material (the premise is perfectly suited for his vibrantly enraged deconstructions of family dynamics), Giordana, who does not have quite the same anger, still acquits himself well, particularly in the back half of the picture when the psychological turmoil paves the way for dream sequences: cinematographer Roberto Forza (the director’s regular collaborator since 2000’s One Hundred Steps) masterfully captures the delicate balance between upsetting reality and even more harrowing nightmare, subtly augmenting the claustrophobia of a narrative that is largely set within four walls, almost in a world of its own (most tellingly, the fact this is technically a period piece has no significant impact on the plot or character development, unlike in other Giordana projects).

Ultimately, what comes to the fore is a strong sense of humanity, conveyed through the dual performance of Ciocca and Barison and the use of piano playing as a marker of growth and empathy. As Rebecca finds herself through the arts, the film quietly gains emotional momentum, with a sense of character that is perhaps the best blend of Bellocchio and Giordana’s sensibilities.

Director: Marco Tullio Giordana
Screenwriters: Marco Bellocchio, Gloria Malatesta, Marco Tullio Giordana
Cast: Sonia Bergamasco, Paolo Pierobon, Valentina Bellè, Beatrice Barison, Sara Ciocca, Michela Cescon
Producers: Simone Gattoni, Marco Bellocchio, Beppe Caschetto, Bruno Benetti, Paolo Del Brocco
Cinematography: Roberto Forza
Production design: Andrea Di Palma
Costume design: Gemma Mascagni
Music: Dario Marianelli
Sound: Fulgenzio Ceccon
Production companies: Kavac Film, IBC Movie, One Art Films, Rai Cinema
World sales: Intra Movies
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Fuori Concorso)
In Italian
114 minutes

Marya (Vesta Matulyte), listless and lonely as a newcomer to the town and bullied because of her limp, hopes that the upcoming casting contest may change her fortunes, when her lanky frame and doll-like face put her as a frontrunner, despite her grungy misfit’s wardrobe and self-conscious, slouching demeanour. As initial enmity thaws into friendship with Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite) after a physical altercation in the street over a pair of stolen jeans, the two embark on a punishing regimen to ready themselves for the day. This is no cliched or sanitised success story of caterpillar-to-butterfly makeovers. Bliuvaite has something darker and socio-politically damning in mind, as she reveals the bleaker side of globalisation for the newly capitalist Baltic states, and the emptiness of consumerism’s promises for underprivileged women.

There is not a lot to do for fun in the town, among its grey and grimy concrete facades and the alleys of dim bars where the underagers try to get served between their own impromptu, outdoor gatherings. Their yearning to leave is compounded by cramped living quarters, and homes where they feel less than welcome. Marya has been foisted upon her grandmother, as her mother has no space for her within a new relationship; Kristina is handed some banknotes by her father to make herself scarce when he wants privacy with his new girlfriend.

It is tempting to slip into sex work for the young women here, where hook-ups with their peers already feel objectifying and transactional, and money is desperately needed for costly modelling school extras like professional photo shoots and extreme slimming aids (a tapeworm sourced from the dark web via a third party is just one non-orthodox measure to deal with the pressure of having their thighs measured by the school mentor while they stand in their underwear.) Alternatives seem nowhere in evidence, still, there is a tough and game stoicism to these youngsters that appeals as a sort of indomitable resilience against the cruelty of an exclusivity imposed from power players above.

Striking compositions and surreal moments of beauty appear often from this everyday trap, due to impressive lensing by D.O.P. Vytautas Katkus, as when Marya is framed lying on a concrete jetty, her handbag as a pillow, shivering with cold against the pink clouds of dawn after a party, or dance segments that add a touch of absurdist surrealism. Poetry-tinged images contrast with others that foreground the grotesque and the town’s decidedly unglamorous realties, such as a tongue-piercing episode in a filthy public bathroom.

There are ample indications that the glamorous opportunities modelling in the metropolises of Japan or the States that they dream of are an illusion knowingly peddled by the school’s owners to line their own pockets, with a fate of entrapment and trafficking the more likely outcome. One young woman, now pregnant and back from New York, describes working at dicey hostessing parties where drinks are spiked; another’s family is saddled with debt when she is recalled. When an older man who lives a bus ride away books a “massage,” there is a sense this is not the only arrangement of the sort going on in a town where regarding one’s body as a money-making product, and repressing any discomfort or sense of violation that results, is normalised and passed on as the knowledge of initiation into getting by as an adult. Ultimately, swapping one milieu of exploitation for another seems the most the young women can hope for, in this bleak and incisive take on cultural imperialism within a European Union where not all are considered born equal, and everything is for sale.

Director, Screenwriter: Saule Bliuvaite
Editing: Igne Narbutaite
Cast: Vesta Matulyte, Ieva Rupeikaite, Giedrius Savickas, Vilma Raubaite, Egle Gabrenaite
Producer: Giedre Burokaite
Cinematographer: Vytautas Katkus
Music: Gediminas Jakubka
Sound: Julius Grigelionis
Production Design: Paulius Anicas
Production company: Akis bado
Sales: Bendita Film Sales
Venue: Sarajevo (Kinoscope)
In Lithuanian
99 minutes

Lowe plays Agnes, a woman we first meet in Scotland in 1688. She’s witnessing an execution and falls head over heels in love with the convict, who manages to escape. It doesn’t go too well for her, though, as she accidentally – and gruesomely – dies, only to wake up a century later, in 1793. Each time she reincarnates, she falls in love with the same man again, and the cycle keeps repeating across time, all the way to the 22nd century.

Besides her and her unrequited love, played by Welsh actor Aneurin Barnard, constants in each era include a person dispensing advice, portrayed by Jacob Anderson, a female confidant (Tanya Reynolds) and the unpleasant, villainous George (Nick Frost), whose animalistic traits are highlighted by the fact he’s actually a dog (with Frost supplying the barking) in the first segment.

Love in its unhappiest form is at the center of Timestalker, which is visibly more ambitious than Prevenge’s deliberately low-budget production value (among other things, Lowe was really pregnant while filming the latter). But what it has gained in aesthetics it has slightly lost in terms of energy: even accounting for the difference in genre and intent, Lowe’s debut had an almost deranged momentum that her sophomore effort can’t match, not least because of its more episodic nature.

The first two segments are the best, as everyone involved clearly enjoys lampooning the stylings of those eras, almost like a gorier Monty Python sketch or Blackadder episode. Frost, in particular, is a joy to behold in the 1793 stretch, as he gets to sink his teeth into some truly despicable villain material, far removed from the schlubby persona that put him on the map in Shaun of the Dead two decades ago. Reynolds also puts her distinctive features and somewhat neurotic acting style to good use in those scenes, and Lowe embodies each incarnation of Agnes with gusto.

Barnard is stuck with the seemingly thankless task of playing the love interest, but it is a testament to his performance that, even before the movie explicitly spells out its point, he has perfectly conveyed the notion that Alex is not prime boyfriend material, but rather just a bland pretty face (unsurprisingly, when the action moves to the 1980s, he’s a teen idol musician).

Together, they all succeed where the film itself occasionally falters, as the narrative loses a bit of steam the further it gets from the somewhat distant past (despite the brief promise of less linear time jumps, which might have provided more lively and unpredictable pacing). It’s a second film that tries too hard, but does so in a manner so charming, be it for the performances or cinematographer Ryan Eddleston’s exquisite aping of different time periods’ lighting, it is hard to not want to tag along for the ride. Because when it really delivers, it’s as darkly humorous as the opening gleefully suggests, joyously upending rom-com clichés one bodily injury at a time.

Director & Screenwriter: Alice Lowe
Cast: Alice Lowe, Jacob Anderson, Aneurin Barnard, Tanya Reynolds, Nick Frost
Producers: Vaughan Sivell, Mark Hopkins, Natan Stoessel, Tom Wood
Cinematography: Ryan Eddleston
Production design: Felicity Hickson
Music: TOYDRUM
Sound: Martin Pavey
Production companies: Western Edge Pictures, Popcorn Group
World sales: HanWay Films
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Piazza Grande)
In English
89 minutes

Well, Jude has got experience in this, as he cut his directorial teeth making TV commercials – a harrowing experience he has already adapted into film with his first feature, The Happiest Girl in the World, and his most recent, last year’s Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Eight Postcards from Utopia (Opt illustrate din lumea ideala) could be considered a reference film for the latter. Divided into eight chapters (and a brief epilogue) and running to just over 70 minutes, Jude and Ferencz-Flatz cut and splice their way through more than 370 TV commercials as they reveal the way distorted ideas about money, modernity, and masculinity were (and still are) communicated and reproduced in a society embracing both the virtues and vices of “freedom”.

Bowing out of competition in Locarno alongside Sleep #2, an hour-long piece comprising online live-cam footage of Andy Warhol’s grave through the seasons, Eight Postcards from Utopia is a mammoth technical undertaking, and a brilliant showcase for how montage works. While the documentary certainly merits its own berth on the festival circuit, it’s perhaps best served on a double-bill so as to provide viewers with the social context from which it (or the accompanying Jude feature) emerged.

The first and longest chapter of Eight Postcards is perhaps its strongest. Titled “History of the Romanians”, it offers a chronological account of Romanian history – Dacian-Roman gladiators, socialist-era orators, stock-market manipulators – as seen through the prism of TV commercials. But more fascinating is how Jude shows advertising copywriters play with even the most tragic chapters of their own history with impunity and wild abandon. Nothing seems to be off-limits: the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu makes an appearance in a cellphone ad; a newspaper beseeches readers for support by saying “Read before [we] go bankrupt”; parodies are made using stereotypical imagery of poor, the peasantry and the Roma.

Things get even more ludicrous as Jude zeroes into the public deification of the so-called free market with “Money Talks”. In the first segment of this chapter, in what looks like outtakes from a studio shoot of an advert, a preposterous, heavily-moustached man in a suit is seated in front of the camera, trying (and failing) to getting one simple line right: “We all strive to multiply your money”. This short and sweet visual anecdote is something that could have come straight out of Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

The third chapter, “The Technological Revolution”, brings forth the outlandish inventions and gadgetry being peddled to the masses. The title itself refers to an actor’s hyperbole about a hair-washing machine shaped like a helmet. “Magique mirage”, meanwhile, highlights the gaudy computer-generated visual effects used to dazzle Romanian viewers of the day. These are mere interludes leading up to “The Ages of Man”. Having already tackled something similar with the use of toys in the 2021 short film Plastic Semiotic, Jude chronicles the journey of man from birth to old age as shaped by the rules, demands and needs of TV advertising.

Well aware of how advertising plays on subliminal human desires, Jude goes from the political to the personal in the film’s final two chapters. Stripping his material of sounds and context, “The Anatomy of Consumption” is a collection of close-ups of the human body. Taken on their own and in slow-motion, even the most innocuous image of someone enjoying a steamy cup of coffee or trashing an apartment could be seen as overloaded with sensory stimulation. All those disembodied faces and fingers might as well be Jude’s nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman.

Godard’s spectre certainly hovers over the documentary’s final chapter. With “Masculin Feminin” – à la the late French cineaste’s 1966 film – Jude reveals the chauvinism which remains very much in place and in vogue in Romanian society (or society in general). Women are shown merely as objectified bodies in these commercials, and described as “delicate, seductive and easy to get”. It’s here that Jude pulls off a masterstroke by putting ads selling erotic services and shampoo side by side: give and take the level of bared flesh, the titillation on display is hardly that different. Plus ça change, then – until the animals could really take over the Earth, as shown by the images included in the epilogue titled “The Green Apocalypse”.

Directors, screenwriters: Radu Jude, Christian Ferencz-Flatz
Producer: Alexandru Teodorescu
Executive director: Ana Maria Gheorghe
Editor: Catalin Cristutiu
Sound: Stefan Ruxandra
Production company: Saga Film
World sales: Heretic
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Fuori Concorso)
In Romanian
71 minutes

Having been the one to instigate an open relationship with her partner Joel (Gael Kamilindi) she now finds herself unpacking boxes in their new apartment in Amsterdam while he is away with another woman. The film is a quiet contemplation that reflects on how we measure isolation and connection, finding new places in the heart of a new city but being swallowed by the blue hues of distance.

In various places, the author Rebecca Solnit has mused on the nature of the colour blur and its relationship to distance. Whether that is the far-flung blue of a mountain range on the horizon, the scattered light of the deep ocean or the open sky, or the length from which we view the things we desire. Pacifique’s film uses this colour association throughout, often dressing Lou in blue, having her inhabit blue spaces, lie against blue carpet, worry about a blue lamp that may or may not have been broken by their removal men.

Framed by this colour she reflects upon Joel choice to be away from her, with another woman, and the motivations through which she decided to propose their non-monogamist relationship. Pacifique’s screenplay is sparse, this is not a film in which dialogue serves to probe at these ideas – instead they develop gradually and through a captivating central performance by Darremont. In the scene where Joel confesses that his situation with the other woman is “getting intense,” Pacifique patiently watches Darremont’s eyes while they convey more that any dialogue could. It gives looking she said I forget a relaxed aspect, but one that allows for great depths and impressive nuance to emerge.

Director, screenplay: Naomi Pacifique
Cast: Juliet Darremont, Gael Kamilindi, Tom de Ronde
Producers: Rafael Manuel, Albert Kuhn, Yan Decoppet, Gabriela Bussmann, Naomi Pacifique
Cinematography: Xenia Patricia
Editing: Lucia Martinez Garcia, Naomi Pacifique
Sound: Marine Maya, Clara Alloing
Music: Ella van der Woude, Cyrielle Formaz, Naomi Pacifique
Production Design: Thea Spiri, Barbara Krantz
Production companies: Idle Eye (Netherlands), GoldenEggProduction, RTS (Switzerland)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Pardi di Domani – Concorso Nazionale)
In French, English, Dutch, Spanish
25 minutes

Akin (a magnetic and intense Cem Yigit Uzumoglu) has had a number of hospital stays over the years but is out and living in the family home, a dimly lit wooden mansion of narrow staircases and drawn lace curtains. He’s taking the mood stabiliser lithium but feels mentally exhausted, and leaves the house mainly just for lone ventures to the mosque and other religious sites. He doesn’t speak much. Pressing himself against the wall of the lamp-filled Hagia Sophia while others pray, or overhearing chatter about the secret ancient cult of Mithraism, it’s as if he is trying to tune himself into a more mystical and sublime system of meaning outside himself, as he detects a presence that is detached from quotidian life. Dynamic, woozy camerawork takes us gliding and swooping through spaces, as if from the point of view of an otherworldly presence in flight (the gift of “new eyes” takes on a particularly sinister meaning later on.) A masterfully intricate, suggestive soundscape hums, taps, mutters and roars. The ominous, blanket noise of one troubled mind, it allows no silent repose, as the wind keeps up a commotion in the trees.

Tensions abound at home, where Akin’s mother contests his memory of his Serbian father as a murdering butcher, a deep wound of generational trauma we glimpse only as a brief hint. She disapproves, too, of a former fellow patient and friend of Akin’s, who stops by uninvited in the middle of the night, unkempt and unfed, and pulls out a crack pipe. Relatives and acquaintances want to help, but their methods — cupping the back, bloodletting with leeches, or guiding his breathing by candlelight — are either reluctantly met, or fail to bring the relief desired. The most his actual doctor can do is offer to bump up the lithium, in response to Akin admitting to meeting with devil-like creatures at the bus stop. As Akin spirals further into an obscure universe to which those around him don’t share access, its exact laws or contours remain as hazy as the twilight that much of the action plays out in (esoteric titles such as “Entrusted Body” and “Dream Weapon” that break up the film’s drift do little to elucidate things.) As the idea of “sign dreams” is introduced, in which beings take the shape of the mind that invites them in, we find ourselves in a film that may ultimately be about the outer reaches of the imagination, where cinema is created. But the deranged denouement on a ferry during a stormy sunset on the Bosphorous is so madcap and exhilarating, we can easily forget about searching for a precise interpretation.

Director, Screenwriter: Gurcan Keltek
Editing: Murat Gultekin, Semih Gulen
Cast: Cem Yigit Uzumoglu, Ayla Algan, Erol Babaoglu, Suzan Kardes, Dilan Duzguner, Gurkan Gedikli
Producer: Arda Ciltepe
Cinematographer: Peter Zeitlinger
Music: Son of Philip
Sound: Massimiliano Borghesi
Production Design: Yunus Emre Yurtseven, Meral Efe Yurtseven
Production companies: Vigo Film (Turkey), Slingshot Films (Italy), 29P Films (Netherlands), The StoryBay (Germany), Fidalgo Productions (Norway)
Sales: Heretic
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internazionale)
In Turkish and Bosnian
130 minutes

Our hero, Nana (played impassively and impressively by Sanaya Andrade in adolescence), is born to a Cape Verdean family. Her mother Nia (Alice Da Luz) leaves soon after her birth, and she is passed from one woman’s arms to another in a stunning scene near the start of the movie.

While still a child, Nana falls sick with a fever and the experience opens a portal to another world. She may be hallucinating, but as a story about a mermaid told by her grandma makes clear, there isn’t too much separating the fanciful from the real in the storytelling culture she’ s born into.

This otherworldly section of the film is steeped in the poetic. It is handled very well but it does go on for a bit too long. We get several figures with a somewhat folkloric claim to reality. One character here is Japanese and it is he who first mouths the title of the film. Later, someone uses it in a poem that’s about as beautiful and elusive as the film itself:

Hanami in the sky./Soft, my love/is rose-coloured.

Apparently, Hanami is a Japanese concept that we are told is ineffable—in the way the enjoyment of abstract things can be. In this case, the enjoyment refers to the falling of cherry blossoms, but maybe just maybe it refers to Fernandes’s film, filled as it is with beautiful images and turns that do not readily give out meaning. But, yes, back in the real world, years go by and everyone gets older. Some of the people who disappeared from the island and the narrative return. It is at this point, that Hanami succumbs to the good old-fashioned concept of suspense, even if it is of the muted kind.

Nia returns and a few questions arise. How will daughter receive mother? What does mother have to offer a daughter with whom she is estranged? The first answer is easy: awkwardly. The latter is complex. Both answers are handled delicately by Fernandes who wrote the script with the relatively well-known Telmo Churro. Everything from this point onwards is non-elliptical, the elusive nature of the film having melted into something different. Emotions and meaning comes to replace the pleasures of atmosphere and visual poetry.

At this point, the film reveals its hands. While concerned with the poetry of an ordinary life and the spiritualism of the Cape Verde and much of West Africa, Hanami also frets about the concrete problem of living in a place that will not ordinarily, readily support a certain kind of dream, even if it yields dreams of its own idiom. Nia’s explanation of why she left her child behind will never quite fly with a certain kind of viewer. But that disagreement is one reason this section of the film would prove relatable to viewers who would potentially be scared off by much of the film’s metaphysical elements.

The adept handling of this bit of the film, by Fernandes, Da Luz, and Andrade, is likely to provoke one question: Why isn’t this mother-daughter relationship parsing longer?

Who knows? But there’s a hint in the director’s note provided by the Locarno Film Festival, where Hanami has premiered. Fernandes, who was born in Europe to Cape Verdean parents says she wants to make the small island country “visible”. Well, mission accomplished.

Slim’s starting point is a deserted area where a dog and a crow are sleeping next to each other. They converse, and exchange words about the dream/nightmare they are having, through Arabic dialogue inscribed on the screen. The dog speaks of her distrust of both the people who live in the village near them, and her anxiety about the people who are coming from afar. Narrating the core story from the perspective of an animal builds on a rich Arabic storytelling legacy that goes back to the eighth century and the creation of the Kalila and Demna fables. Slim’s approach remains fresh and unique as the film’s plot unfolds, which proves liberating as he switches from one narrative line to another.

In a remote city in Tunisia, Fathi (Neji Kanaweti), a local police officer, and Amine (Bilel Slatnia), a doctor in a public clinic, are concerned when three individuals who were killed under unknown circumstances and whose bodies have disappeared, rise to life again.

With very limited resources and capabilities, both Fathi and Amine try to find a scientific and reasonable solution to the phenomenon with the resources they have, without alerting the village and spreading panic. Minutes before the middle of the film, a second investigator and super-cop Omar (played by Majd Mastoura), working in a sophisticated police unit in the capital, arrives with his neat staff in their fancy cars, trying to shake things up. His mission is not to address the problem, but rather to maintain order, quell dissent, and leave room for any rumours or doubts.

After a captivating first half, Slim abandons the investigative line of the plot, only to start a new line, which is the harshest part of the animals’ dream. As part of a deal between Omar and the village elders and clerics, they cover up the ongoing crisis in exchange for getting rid of stray dogs and crows.

This leads the film to carry an environmental angle, as Slim flirts with the idea of the original inhabitants of the land, and how the new inhabitants are solving their problems by exterminating the originals. In the film, one of the superficial solutions to solve the inexplicable phenomenon is to kill stray dogs and spray trees to eliminate crows.

Slim’s filmography champions nature and makes room for cinematography that captures vivid atmosphere.  His earlier films have received considerable critical acclaim: The Last of Us (2016), which earned the Lion of the Future Award at Venice, and Tlamess (2019), which was chosen for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.

These ‘returnees’, who are not dead and not alive, arrive to haunt the village not as ghosts, but by bringing up painful memories and societal shortcomings. They arrive with a ‘curse’, causing the crops and the fish in the sea to die. It is refreshing to see Arab filmmakers go outside the repeated melodrama framework to address social and political issues in their societies.

Slim plays with film-genre and police thriller to build up his plot, while infusing deep political and hyperlocal segments. For example, the three killings which obviously traumatized the village, and left the families victims with no closure, with no assistance from the national government and its bureaucrats, were traumatizing incidents that have scarred Tunisian society. The first is of a shepherd who was decapitated by the Islamic State extremists. The second is a woman, like thousands, who decided to immigrate to Europe by sea, drowning with her husband in what is now known as “Mediterranean graveyard”. The third is a factory worker who dies in a quarry, and is left there since there are no rescue efforts from the state.

Director: Ala Eddine Slim
Screenplay,editing: Ala Eddine Slim
Cast: Neji Kanaweti, Bilel Slatnia, Majd Mastoura, Sonia Zarg Ayouna
Cinematography: Amine MessadiProducer: Ala Eddine Slim
Co-producer: Julie Viez
Production: Exit Productions
Co-production: Cinenovo
International sales: MAD Solutions
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Concorso Internazionale)
In Arabic, French
100 minutes

The camera follows kids as they talk and converse among themselves. It then follows one of those kids into a home where he has some lighthearted banter with his grandmum. Their subject is one of the usuals: the existence or absence of a girlfriend.

From that exchange, we get a particularly modern bit of insight into relationships: if a girl likes you because she saw your pretty face on social media, she is likely to leave you for another pretty face on social media. The philosophy comes from the kid but it sounds like the type of wisdom that an older person would reject to his/her detriment. Nonetheless, all of that talk is appetizer for a story that is decidedly not about romance.

In time, Melrick, the kid, gets involved in much heavier conversations, even when he barely contributes. When we meet him, he is with his grandmum for the holidays in a ‘hood in Guiana, where he has taken up drumming. He seems mighty pleased about the arrangement and would rather stay with grandma than head back home. What he is yet to fully grasp is that his family and his grandma’s neighbourhood are still dealing with the fallout of an incident from years before.

We understand, over the course of the film, that the spirit of a man named Lucas hovers. We soon learn why. He is Melrick’s late uncle, and it is in discussing his life and his murder at a party that the film’s lightness curdles into darkness. Yannick, Lucas’s best friend, speaks to Melrick about how the death still haunts him. Melrick’s grandmum, in a flipping of their earlier comedic conversation, tells her grandson how close she was to hitting one of the culprits with her car. With each conversation, you see Melrick’s expressive face coming to terms with what he is being told. Grandma preaches forgiveness; Yannick isn’t quite ready for that. But what does all of this mean to Melrick, a kid whose memory doesn’t encompass this event that nonetheless affects him so?

For much of the film, the exchanges and even the cinematographic choices have the feel of a documentary. We get a shaky-handheld lofi vibe. A lot of the discussions proceed in the same manner. People speak as though the obvious presence of a camera changes little of their behaviour. This, one imagines, is what producers of realist cinema crave. But there is an extra reason for the lack of artifice.

The film’s main cast are playing lightly fictionalised versions of themselves and the story being told has its roots in director Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s family history. At the end of the film, there is a dedication to the real Lucas and the cast is using their real name. Melrick, Jean-Bapiste’s actual cousin, appears to be a stand-in for a director ruminating over a central event in the life of his family. Maybe this is therapy but it does play well on the screen.

It comes as no surprise t0 learn that Listen to the Voices got distribution even before its Locarno premiere. Jean-Baptiste has made a deeply impressive first feature, handling a personal subject with confidence. Of course, his film has one of the hallmarks of a first feature without the involvement of big investment: it looks cheap. But it works in Jean-Baptiste’s favour, given the personal nature of the project. And although set in Guiana, the narrative of violence, vengeance, and blackness in poor neighbourhoods connects this film to John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God.

Somewhere, a smart curator is dreaming of screening these three films together. A possible theme is the long-lasting impact of slavery. Another, perhaps less politically correct, theme is the vicious circle of violence and vengeance in poor black neighbourhoods—wherever they are found.

Burtt is the 2024 recipient of the Vision Award Ticinomoda, a prize introduced in 2013 to honor those who work behind the scenes and are perhaps not as well-known as they deserve to be. The inaugural award went to special effects legend Douglas Trumbull, and subsequent honorees have included composer Howard Shore (2016), title sequence designer Kyle Cooper (2018) and editor Pietro Scalia (2023). Burtt is the second sound designer to receive the prize, after Walter Murch in 2015.

Not that sound was an actual career goal: Burtt originally studied to become a physicist, with moviemaking as a hobby. That hobby sparked his interest in the audio domain, since sound had to be added in post-production, and when he eventually enrolled at the University of Southern California (shortly after future collaborator George Lucas had graduated) he became the go-to sound guy for fellow students. “And when Lucasfilm came looking for people to work in that department on the first Star Wars, my name came up.”

The rest, as they say, is history: Chewbacca’s roars, Darth Vader’s breathing, R2-D2’s bleeps, the distinctive lightsaber noise, all of that came from Burtt’s experiments with various noises. The first film in the galactic saga also featured his first use of the so-called Wilhelm Scream, a library sound effect he originally used as “an embarrassing inside joke” with fellow film student Richard L. Anderson, with the two of them incorporating it in every project they worked on. “For about 25 years, no one really paid attention to it. Then, with the Internet and DVDs, people started noticing.”

Working on the movies set in a galaxy far, far away is an experience he looks back on fondly, primarily because of how the collaboration with Lucas worked: “He involved the sound department early on in the process, whereas most filmmakers start thinking about it after shooting.” Burtt mentions the example of the podracing sequence in The Phantom Menace, a film on which he also served as the editor. “I started working on that sequence months before George actually shot it. Matthew Wood, who has since gone on to have greater responsibilities at Lucasfilm, was my assistant, and we particularly enjoyed coming up with temporary voices for the various aliens, some of which were good enough to be included in the finished film.”

He’s also proud of some of the less ostentatious work he’s done, particularly for more grounded projects like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, for which he set out to record the noises of as many objects the real president had come into contact with as possible. This includes Lincoln’s actual watch: “We tracked down two of them. One was in the Smithsonian, and there was no way they would let us anywhere near it. The other one was in Kentucky, and the guy who had it happened to be a Star Wars fan, so when I said who I was he immediately agreed.”

As a moviegoer, Burtt recently enjoyed the sound design in The Fall Guy and Oppenheimer (“Very interesting sound work, like in all of Nolan’s films”), the latter being, of course, the brainchild of a director who still favors an analog approach to the craft. As someone who, through Lucasfilm, had a front row seat when it came to technological evolution in Hollywood, how does Burtt view the use of digital tools? “It has its upsides and downsides. The upside is cleaner work, because when you had to put everything together analogically, you’d then have to make a copy of the film, and with every copy you lose a little something. The main downside is, it leads to procrastination, because you can change things at the last minute.”

Lainey (Nancy McArthur) and her partner (Oliver Demers) are having an intimate night together on the eve of her 26^th birthday asking each other personal questions while pointing a camcorder at one another. When Lainey is prompted to divulge her deepest, darkest, most embarrassing sexual fantasy, her answer provokes a surprising response. Through this scenario, Freak deftly explores our capacity for understanding and empathy, while needling how our insecurities come so immediately to bear in moments of stress and argument.

When her partner finds the adolescent kink that she reveals to them to be ‘a little weird’ their conversation immediately spirals into recriminations about how accepting and supportive they both genuinely are of each other’s histories and identities. Slights may not be imagined, but they are exploded by both parties’ self-doubt into parts of more labyrinthine behavioural patterns that bely their outward approval. In Lainey’s case, these concerns surround her strongly religious upbringing and its position as both quaint detail and embarrassing secret. In the other direction are worries about Lainey’s understanding of her partner’s queerness, their appearance masculine enough to pass as long as her family aren’t subjected to telltale lip gloss.

All of this is presented like an overheard conversation, the viewer put in the position of the camcorder lens, watching through grungy video aesthetics until the camera is dropped onto the bed when their disagreement begins. We are not seeing what is happening, but we listen in, eavesdropping and drawing our own judgmental conclusion about their tit-for-tat exchange. In just 13 minutes, Barnett manages to explore this situation in a nuanced way, encapsulating the precarity of our acceptance by others, or at least the way we internalise a precarity based on our own self-image. That she also ends Freak with a moment of pitch-perfect catharsis and hope is the icing on the cake.

Director, editing: Claire Barnett
Cast: Nancy McArthur, Oliver Demers
Producer: Claire Barnett, Natalie Remplakowski
Cinematography: Claire Barnett, Nancy McArthur, Oliver Demers
Sound design: Giorgi Koridze, Nino Benashvili
Production: Claire Barnett (USA)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Pardi di Domani – Concorso Internatzionale)
In English
13 minutes

Many years as a competitive mixed martial arts fighter are coming to an end for Sarah, who is no longer at her prime in the ring. She is feeling lost, especially as her more conventionally family-oriented sister has no qualms in picking apart her lack of steady income as she attempts to diversify into a career as a freelance trainer. Performance artist and trained martial arts fighter Florentina Holzinger is an excellent and credible casting choice as Sarah, whose brittle vulnerability hides behind no-nonsense, dry wit and tough physicality. Amid tension and dead ends at home, Sarah takes a leap of faith and, after a cursory but genial Zoom call with a wealthy young man in Jordan who placed an ad, and tells her MMA is the latest trend there, agrees to fly out for a role as personal trainer for his three sisters. The set-up puts us immediately on alert that Sarah’s impulsive trip abroad, with scant background research done or safeguards in place, may go pear-shaped fast, and Ayub deftly toys with these expectations, switching between setting us on threatened edge and reassuring us.

Touching down in Jordan, Sarah lands in a cloistered bubble, where she is ferried between her luxury hotel and the extravagant villa out of town where she is to give her training sessions by a personal driver who seems to double as a minder. She is at first taken aback, and, compounded by more than a little culture shock, does not know quite what to make of the teenage sisters Shaima (Nagham Abu Baker), Fatima (Celina Antwan), and Nour (Andria Tayeh), or their expectations of her. Cut off from the outside world, aside from supervised visits to an airless shopping mall, homeschooled and prohibited from internet access, the girls spend most of their time shut up inside. Their moods lurch wildly between curious, mischievous, irritable and listless — with minimal commitment to the prospect of a training routine. As their parents are living in Qatar, their brother (who hired Sarah) is effectively in charge. Effusive and accommodating at first, he nevertheless presses Sarah to sign a non-disclosure agreement — and exactly what this family, notorious in the city, has to hide will be Sarah’s shocking discovery. The hotel bar, with its sympathetic but cagey local bartender, becomes the sole outlet for Sarah to unwind and seek guidance for her building distress, but it is a spot that caters cynically with a double standard of morality to tourists for economic gain, without engendering any sincere trust, and as Sarah’s situation spins out of control, it becomes less a haven than another set of eyes for surveillance.

Revelations are brought to a head after Nour, the most rebellious of the three sisters, borrows Sarah’s phone to film a message. Without giving away a key spoiler and dramatic twists (one bombshell event is particularly egregious in its framing of an extreme act of sacrifice or defiance), Moon is revealed to be a horror story of human rights abuse, abduction and imprisonment reminiscent of the plight of Dubai’s captive Princess Latifa, which gripped the western news media in recent years. There is an uncomfortable sense that, while such documented cases of familial control are all too numerous, the film plays up a little too much to reductive, fear-based and exoticised stereotypes of the Arab world as home to treacherous enclaves of limitless wealth and unchecked patriarchal power, particularly when a potential white saviour figure, as rudderless and conflicted as Sarah may be, is added to the mix as the embodiment of a tangible way out for the sisters.

Director, Screenwriter: Kurdwin Ayub
Cast: Florentina Holzinger, Andria Tayeh, Celina Antwan, Nagham Abu Baker
Producers: Ulrich Seidl
Cinematographer: Klemens Hufnagl
Editing: Roland Stöttinger
Sound: David Almeida- Ribeiro
Production company: Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion
Sales: Bendita Film Sales 
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internationale)
In English, Arabic, German
92 minutes

Rebecca (played with wilful intensity by German actress Helena Zengel) found herself in the Amazon after surviving a plane crash as a child, in which her mother died. An Indigenous man out hunting carried her to safety, after chancing upon the wreckage. The film opens with a scene of the crash aftermath. The catastrophe is frozen still amid the verdant and light-flooded lushness of the jungle like Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”, or some other Romantic oil painting of lives blown off course by gruesome circumstances. A giant ant scuttles down a white, lifeless arm, which lies alien-like amid the cacophony of chirping birds, insects and dripping water. It’s an image that often replayed in the troubled dreams of Rebecca as she grew up, and continues to haunt her. Whether a flashback or a dream, the scene is imprinted with the vivid surrealism of traumatic shock.

Now on the cusp of adulthood, Rebecca is well-practiced in waxing lyrical about her ordeal through a microphone on stage to the Indigenous crowds who come to the mission. She stirs them into an ecstatic state with her claims of having been chosen by God, her survival a miracle. Her father Lawrence Byrne (Jeremy Xido, balancing earnestness with entitled arrogance) has trained her effectively in zeal as a vocation, and they sing emotional folk duets together as a well-oiled double act. But his paternalist sanctimony drives a widening wedge between them, as he takes it upon himself to preach non-retaliatory action to members of the local Iriarte tribe, who resort to equipment sabotage and blocking the road as acts of resistance against the ongoing logging of their land by the owner of a sawmill. Rebecca feels further alienated by the potential threat of a rival for her father’s attention as Lawrence turns his insistent and persuasive charms toward Denise (Sabine Timoteo), a woman who it emerges may have worked with her mother at a hospice. New questions are raised, in the process, about Rebecca’s origins.

In true colonialist fashion, the missionaries are unsure of their roots, but confident of their dominion. The Indigenous populace know their way around the rainforest where their ancestors have long belonged, but this only increases the antagonism of the sawmill’s men who, bearing chainsaws and firearms, violently endanger their existence, viewing them as a mere obstacle to their corporate interests. Rebecca’s sympathies align increasingly with the protesters, especially after one of them, Jilvan (Iwinaiwa Assurini) is brought, wounded, to recuperate in their home. When Rebecca is called on to work a miracle in exchange for the Iriarte’s freedom, it is a potent symbol of the currency of white European power, over the territory’s dispossessed.

Transamazonia settles more squarely into conventional thriller suspense as it builds toward its downbeat end, the mood aided by a quietly ominous electronic score by Lim Giong, and atmospheric lensing of the forest by D.O.P. Mathieu de Montgrand in greens and blues that shimmer and shine, or deepen into gloom.

Director: Pia Marais
Screenwriters: Pia Marais, Willem Droste
Cinematographer: Mathieu de Montgrand
Cast: Helena Zengel, Jeremy Xido, Sabine Timoteo, Hamã Luciano, Iwinaiwa Assurini
Producers: Sophie Erbs, Tom Dercourt, Pierrick Baudouin, Murielle Thierrin, Claudia Steffen, Christoph Friedel, Jean-Marc Fröhle , Stefano Centini, Chuti Chang, Camilo Cavalcanti, Viviane Mendonça, Jorane Castro, Pia Marais, Alex C. Lo, Guilherme Cezar Coelho, Fernando Loureiro
Editing: Matthieu Laclau, Yann-Shan Tsai
Sound: Dana Farzanehpour, Andreas Hildebrandt, Frank Cheng
Music: Lim Giong
Production Design: Petra Barchi
Production companies: Cinéma Defacto (France), Gaijin (France), Alabra Films (France), Pandora Film Produktion (Germany), Point Productions (Switzerland), Volos Films (Taiwan), O Par (Brazil), Cabocla Filmes (Brazil), Tigresa & Matizar Filmes (Brazil), Moonduckling Films, Jazzy Pictures
Sales: The Party Film Sales 
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internazionale)
In Portuguese and English
112 minutes

When we meet him at the start of the film, his face telegraphs a mix of helplessness and obliviousness. Later, his daughter Miriam hands him a few appurtenances of his former life. Photos, notes, diaries. Perhaps she can jig his memory, as an expert advises, but not so much as to send the old man spiraling.

Those diaries lead to flashbacks but not in the most ordered of ways. Fgaier, who wrote the screenplay, seems to want to recreate the non-linearity of memory, especially one as elusive as Gian’s. The principal material for these flashbacks is a story of, what else, a romance in his youth, with a girl named Leila.

Back in 1983, at the time when Gian met Leila met, the girl had been occupied by another; but there was enough between the pair to give the boy hope. “When I kissed you, I felt we would kiss again; it seemed impossible that it wouldn’t happen again.” It is the sort of thing that perhaps only a young man will say—his future coiled somewhere in his heart and loins. For the attractive youth, pleasure always appears within reach.

In any case, the pair separates, deciding to meet at some point, which is in turn reminiscent of Linklater’s Before Sunset. But things happen. Will the person you met that one night be the same person a year later? In two? In some ways, the story involving young Gian is refracted in the story involving his older self. Both are dealing with the memory of a woman in different ways.

This two-laned approach lends Weightless a more philosophical feel than a purely storytelling one. This reading of the film is encouraged by Fgaier’s use of archival material that doesn’t always directly include Gian. The story begins to blend somewhat into a video essay, a quirk that definitely makes Weightless the sort of film that arthouses welcome. Most other audiences will stay away, although the musically inclined will find a passage involving a pair of lovers dancing to the 1968 hit ‘Crimson and Clover’ quite pleasing.

The narrative’s semi-bifurcation also saps a bit of force from both tales, though a more generous reading of the story is that viewers get two stories for the price of one. There is a romance and a meditation on that romance. The film does open with a note that seems to tell us that Weightless is about the latter. The note is from Levels of Life, a book by the English writer Julian Barnes on the passing of his wife. One of that book’s motifs—a balloon—also shows up on the cover of one of Gian’s diaries. There are also shades of the idea in the film’s title.

But, yes, there is something elliptical, elusive about Fgaier’s first feature. It recalls Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years—even as it flips the idea of a woman discovering her husband’s youthful love. But it doesn’t quite have that film’s definite purpose.

This film, however, avoids the vast indulgence many arthouse directors seem to favour, and sometimes its elusiveness is a boon. And yet, maybe a more powerful film could be put together if the focus was exclusively on Gian and his daughter Miriam, who brings her son Elyas to his grandfather’s.

We get a hint of that possibility when Miriam snaps at her father, almost accusing him of a willfully forgetting, but the exploration of the generational effect of grief doesn’t go on for too long. Yes, that would be a different film. But the question is inescapable: Wouldn’t that be a stronger story?

In this corroded urban landscape of junk and quirky knick knacks, where pedestrians stop to haggle over old pots and car parts are sought out on the cheap, Bart (Nikolo Ghviniashvili), a trans man and junk dealer with a taste for gambling, teams up with Gonga (Nika Gongadze), a long-haired youth in a Misfits T-shirt, for a door-to-door start-up enterprise selling neon crucifixes. Gonga’s father has just died, and a compliment the pair receive at the cemetery for their craftwork after they jazz up one of the rusty crosses they find in an old chest in the scrapyard with LED lighting sparks their dreams of a lucrative market. They imagine their neon crucifixes spreading across the country, glowing against the skyline.

Visits to apartments by Bart and Gonga as they try to make sales reveal more strange, charming worlds of objects and rituals, some embracing and others departing from tradition. An aquarium contains an owner’s reconfigured pantheon of Buddha and pharoah figurines; a boisterous meal is marked by toasts and harmonies praising Georgian wine; a contortionist determinedly folds himself into a small, glass-sided box. This is a city teeming with an irrepressible playfulness and personality, even when money is tight.

Bart, who sleeps in a car and is in debt to some gangsters, has a tightknit group of queer friends to celebrate life events with, but segments of the wider society are unaccepting of his identity, not least the surly creditors, when they turn to heavy intimidation to demand repayment, and get their hands on his identity documents. This echoes real-life discrimination against actor Ghviniashvili, who took a gender recognition case to the European Court after Georgian authorities refused to issue him new documents matching his gender. Meanwhile Gonga, amid the struggles of the new enterprise, spends aimless hours mulling the mysterious nature of friendship and love.

The scrapyard is a rambling site for both collecting objects and just hanging out, the dire prospects for regular work in the city meaning time in the day must be passed somehow, smoking weed or swinging from a crane, or with a lovelorn song of rejection torn between longing and colourful curses while reclining on a tower of tyres. Static shots frame spaces of absurd clutter as if they are parodic tableaux of great scenes from history; certainly, there is a sense that capitalistic greed has sucked the dignity from Tbilisi, and made the work of simply living a corrupt and hollow game. Stray dogs wander across the screen, on their own nocturnal missions on the long summer nights, and cramped apartments brim with cats. The city’s citizens often speak of the emotional lives of their pets, be it a jealous angelfish, or a canine friend that can’t put its intelligent observations into words. There is a sense of equality among all these beings on the margins, we get the sense, outside the bitter hierarchies of power, even if it comes from being at the bottom of the pile, with nothing. “Winning and losing are two faces of the same coin,” as Bart says, in a world where getting ahead is just a sef-indulgent daydream.

Director, Cinematography: Tato Kotetishvili
Screenwriters: Tato Kotetishvili, Irene Jordania, Nutsa Tsikaridze
Editing: Nodar Nozadze
Cast: Nikolo Ghviniashvili, Nika Gongadze
Producers: Tato Kotetishvili, Tekla Machavariani
Music: Nodar Nozadze, Nika Paniashvili, Vaqo
Production Design: Nato Bagrationi, Anuka, Kalandarishvili
Production companies: Zango Studio (Georgia), Nushi Film (Georgia), GOGO Film (The Netherlands), The Film Kitchen (The Netherlands)
Sales: zangostudio@gmail.com
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Cineasti del Presente)
In Georgian
95 minutes

Set in a nondescript Alpine location in Switzerland (Macdonald is Swiss on his mother’s side), the film revolves around Barbara Duggen (Eve Connolly), a seamstress who is struggling to keep her late mother’s fabric shop alive. One assignment in particular causes her to leave the village, and while driving she stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad: two motorcyclists on the road with their guns and a briefcase. Barbara has three choices: commit the perfect crime, call 911, or just leave and pretend nothing ever happened.

The movie explores the outcome of all three scenarios, a sort of Run Lola Run by way of No Country For Old Men (the latter being the declared inspiration for the original Sew Torn short). And while the compellingly eerie mood is present from the beginning, the film really comes alive with its heightened sense of reality (or realities) the minute that fork in the road presents itself: Macdonald takes full advantage of the hypnotic blend of a typically American premise transposed to a Swiss-German village (the movie was shot entirely in the Sarganserland region of the canton of St. Gallen, in the north-east of Switzerland), with the mountains and forests adding to the increasingly surreal flavor of proceedings.

Much of the dramatic tension rests on the shoulders of Eve Connolly, whose innocent facial features are the ideal conduit for the moral doubts that populate the premise and give each segment a distinct feel while still retaining the sense of everything being part of a neatly constructed whole (fittingly, the main title card is literally sewn into existence). She receives solid support from a group of screen veterans whose ranks include fellow Irish performer John Lynch in a brief but indelible role and British/Australian actress Caroline Goodall as the posh client whose demands lead to the multiple-choice incident.

The other star player is, of course, Macdonald himself, who in addition to writing and directing also serves as the picture’s editor, effectively taking on a role similar to Barbara’s, as he has to create a coherent, visually appealing pattern from the fragments assembled during principal photography. Be it literally or metaphorically, on screen and off, it all hangs by a thread, and the protagonist and her creator prove equally skilled at obtaining impressive results from the smallest of starting points. The shop may be nearing the chopping block, but everything that led to us seeing it on the screen suggests that the new Swiss-American talent behind the camera is here to stay, beyond the 95-minute confine of this carefully plotted, energetic feature debut.

Director: Freddy Macdonald
Screenwriters: Freddy Macdonald, Fred Macdonald
Cast: Eve Connolly, Calum Worthy, John Lynch, Caroline Goodall, K Callan, Thomas Douglas, Ron Cook, Werner Biermeier, Veronika Herren-Wenger
Producers: Fred Macdonald, Barry Navidi, Sebastian Klinger, Diamantis Zavitsanos, Socratis Zavitsanos
Cinematography: Sebastian Klinger
Production design: Viviane Rapp
Costume design: Viviane Rapp
Music: Jacob Tardien
Sound: Alexander Stratigenas
Production companies: Sew Torn, ORISONO
World sales: UTA
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Piazza Grande)
In English
95 minutes