The Permanent Picture spans two periods of time, with fifty years between. The post-war rural south of Spain is a funereal world thick with shadows in which death hangs close, crucifixes hang over beds, and the Catholic Church dictates rigid self-control in female behaviour. From there, we shift northward, into the modern, urban realm of an advertising agency, where billboards are the new effigies, and the search is on for the perfect face to convince electoral voters.

A teenage mother leaves from her small town in the dead of night. The circumstances are hazy, but her urge to flee is not hard to fathom, as this is a sombre, fear-driven place of whispered riddles and stern judgments, where strict conformity governs rules for demure comportment. Mortality haunts daily life, and there is little line drawn between the worlds of the living and the dead. Rumoured apparitions of the Virgin spook locals, illness is left in the hands of God, and the young are forbidden to laugh in portrait sittings in case the spontaneous eruption of a smile should ruin their looks. The disappearing mother leaves her baby behind, in a traumatic separation that comes back into focus years later. 

In contemporary times, Carmen (Maria Luengo) has resettled in the northern part of the country, where she works as an advertising agency casting director. She takes a scouting trip to the countryside, searching for that elusive find of a face that has a “normal” realness to it, but is not so authentic that dreams and desires cannot be projected onto it. She chances upon Antonia (Antonia Ortega), who is getting by as a street vendor of perfume. Past and present collapse onto one another, as memory, displacement and grief haunt the new bond that forms between them.

The cryptic, stylised nature of this latticework of symbolic incident and encounter deflects any deep emotional identification with the protagonists, in a film that keeps reminding us of its own — and all cinema’s — intrinsic, depthless artificiality. We are prompted, instead, to question and doubt that images can capture even a sliver of momentary truth, and ponder what comfort or communion can be gained from a technological process that traffics in ghostly illusion. Strange visual phenomena and a history of spectral keepsakes are referenced to add evocative layers to the notion of looking as a cord to ease the pain of fatal separation: the double-exposed spirit photographs that enabled relatives to be pictured with those who had died or disappeared in the war, as if they were all still present together; and the “phantom limb” trick the brain plays after an amputation when seeing a mirror reflection and registering the lost hand still to be there. A rich soundscape of off-screen sounds (the sea, a baby crying, clicking fingers) deftly retains the presence of what is not seen in our orbit, in a world in which even sun on one’s face offers no empirical certainty there will not be rain moments later.

Director, Writer: Laura Ferres
Producer: Adrià Monés Murlans
Editor: Aina Calleja
Cinematography: Agnès Piqué Corbera
Cast: María Luengo, Rosario Ortega, Saraida Llamas, Claudia Fimia, Mila Collado, Dolores Martínez
Music: Fernando Moresi Haberman, Sergio Bertran
Sound: Dani Fontrodona
Sound Design: Alejandro Castillo
Music: Fernando Moresi Haberman, Sergio Bertran
Art Direction: Marta Collell
Production companies: Fasten Films (Spain), Le Bureau (France)
Sales: Be For Films (Belgium)
Venue: Sarajevo International Film Festival (Kinoscope)
In Catalan, Spanish
94 minutes

After some rocky years in which the Locarno Film Festival seemed more appreciated by filmmakers than critics, the situation is evening out as artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro and his programming team complete their third year guiding the venerable event, with a stronger-than-usual international competition line-up.

That’s especially good news as the Festival moves into a new period of its existence, with long-time president Marco Solari handing control over to his successor Maja Hoffmann. Solari, a hands-on, ebullient presence whose deep links to Switzerland’s Ticino region ensured that the Festival maintained and solidified its importance within the country’s Italian-speaking canton, now passes the baton to Hoffmann, an international art patron on a major scale (Bloomberg lists her as the 435th richest person in the world), whose philanthropic activities are better known globally than regionally. She does however have experience in the film world, having studied filmmaking in New York and acted as executive producer, most especially on documentaries about artists. How she’ll seek to change Locarno, which just finished its 76th edition, remains to be seen, though her arrival is one of the more interesting developments in the ever-changing festival world.

The criticisms of recent years that the Piazza Grande selection felt increasingly amorphous haven’t subsided, but this year’s international competition boasted of a number of strong titles whose future life seems assured. Topping the list are two remarkably bold and excoriating takes on their own societies: Radu Jude’s withering Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and Ali Ahmadzadeh’s risky Critical Zone. While vastly different in approach, the two films, one from Romania, the other from Iran, fillet their country’s social order (or lack thereof):  in the latter, government repression has forced people to rely on each other, whereas in the former, government corruption has smashed the social fabric. Unsurprisingly, they nabbed the two top honors, with the Pardo d’oro (Grand Prize) for best film going to Critical Zone and the Special Jury Prize to Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

Other prizes in the international competition went to Maryna Vroda as best director for the Ukrainian film Stepne, while Sylvain George received a Special Mention for his French-Swiss coproduction set in the enclave of Melilla, Nuit obscure – Au revoir ici, n’importe où. The gender neutral best performance awards both went to women: Dimitra Vlagopoulou for her turn in Sofia Exarchou’s Animal, and Renée Soutendijk for Ena Sendijarevic’s Sweet Dreams. Among prizes in other sections, mention should be made of the best film in the Cineasti del presente section: Singaporean director Nelson Yeo’s Dreaming & Dying, which also won the best first feature prize.

In the prestigious shorts section, U.S. based directors Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan took home the top prize for The Passing. Quentin Dupieux’s Yannick was a peculiar choice for the Europa Cinemas Label award as Best European film at the Festival.

Other noteworthy films in this year’s edition include Dani Rosenberg’s compelling The Vanishing Soldier and Rossosperanza from France-based Italian director Annarita Zambrano, both films that tell stories about young protagonists within very specific socio-political contexts. Both are also sophomore features. It’s always refreshing to see young faces on screen in Locarno, and young filmmakers getting their moment in the spotlight with a coveted award in the international competition. Rosenberg and Zambrano had their first works premiere in sidebars in Cannes, so it must be gratifying for Locarno to see them take their next step in the main section of the lakeside festival.

The Festival start was filled with worrying voices fearful that the Hollywood actors’ strike would harm coverage, but ironically Riz Ahmed’s inability to attend and promote the opening short Dammi became a far greater talking point than his presence would ever have been. The same “benefit”, if you will, won’t be accorded to Venice, a festival far more reliant on big-name stars than Locarno, where the filmmakers themselves get the majority of attention. This year in Locarno was no exception, with luminaries including Istvan Szabo, Yousry Nasrallah, Ken Loach, Lav Diaz and Barbet Schroeder on hand to receive awards or promote films both past and present.

One of the highlights of the Locarno Festival this year was without a doubt the retrospective dedicated to popular Mexican Cinema from the 1940s through the mid-1960s, with many relatively unknown films — some even unknown in Mexico as well as abroad! — finally getting the applause, laughter, tears and shudders they deserve. And often in a single movie, as a lot of the output is a fascinating mix of genres that combines Mexican songs with romance, humor and elements of film noir or horror. The most famous name in the line-up, without a doubt, was Luis Buñuel, but true to the retrospective’s spirit of discovery, the film chosen was an unknown one: The River and Death, a rural-village drama about two clans whose vendettas have kept them fighting for generations. Though Buñuel is of course interested in how the (often unwritten) rules of society make us all prisoners, his straightforward approach to the story underlines to what extent the master filmmaker was able to blend in with the other popular filmmakers working in Mexico around the same time. Interestingly, how the rules of society impact our lives is not only a topic with not only a contemporary resonance, but actually one that several of the new films in Locarno also tackled head-on.

The Film Verdict at Locarno Film Festival 2023.

Pardo d’oro Grand Prize of the Festival of the City of Locarno for best film
CRITICAL ZONE (MANTAGHEYE BOHRANI) by Ali Ahmadzadeh
Iran/Germany

Special Jury Prize of the Cities of Ascona and Losone
DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (NU ASTEPTA PREA MULT DE LA SFÂRSITUL LUMII) by Radu Jude
Romania/Luxembourg/France/Croatia

Pardo for Best Direction of the City and Region of Locarno
Maryna Vroda
for STEPNE
Ukraine/Germany/Poland/Slovakia

Pardos for Best Performance
Dimitra Vlagopoulou for ANIMAL
Renée Soutendijk for SWEET DREAMS

Special Mention
NUIT OBSCURE – AU REVOIR ICI, N’IMPORTE OÙ
by Sylvain George
France/Switzerland

CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE COMPETITION

Pardo d’oro to the best film
DREAMING & DYING (HAO JIU BU JIAN)
by Nelson Yeo
Singapore/Indonesia

Best Emerging Director Award of the City and Region of Locarno
Katharina Huber
for EIN SCHÖNER ORT
Germany

Special Jury Prize CINÉ+
CAMPING DU LAC
by Éléonore Saintagnan
Belgium/France

Pardos for Best Performance
Clara Schwinning for EIN SCHÖNER ORT
Isold Halldórudóttir and Stavros Zafeiris for TOUCHED

Special Mentions
EXCURSION( EKSKURZIUA) by Una Gunjak
NEGU HURBILAK by Colectivo Negu

Swatch First Feature Award
DREAMING & DYING (HAO JIU BU JIAN)
by Nelson Yeo
Singapore/Indonesia

PARDI DI DOMANI (Short Films)

Pardino d’oro Swiss Life for the Best Auteur Short Film
THE PASSING
by Ivete Lucas, Patrick Bresnan
U.S.A.

Special Mention and Short Film candidate of the Locarno Film Festival for the European Film Awards
BEEN THERE
by Corina Schwingruber Ili?
Switzerland

Pardino d’oro SRG SSR for the Best International Short Film
A STUDY OF EMPATHY (EN UNDERSØGELSE AF EMPATI)
by Hilke Rönnfeldt
Denmark/Germany

Pardino d’argento SRG SSR for the International Competition
DU BIST SO WUNDERBAR
by Leandro Goddinho, Paulo Menezes
Germany/Brazil

Pardi di domani Best Direction Award – BONALUMI Engineering
Eric K. Boulianne
for FAIRE UN ENFANT, Canada

Medien Patent Verwaltung AG Award
THE GUARD (NEGAHBAN) by Amirhossein Shojaei, Iran

Special Mention
THE LOVERS
by Carolina Sandvik, Sweden

NATIONAL COMPETITION

Pardino d’oro for the Best Swiss Short Film
LETZTE NACHT
by Lea Bloch, Switzerland

Pardino d’argento for the National Competition
NIGHT SHIFT
by Kayije Kagame, Hugo Radi, Switzerland

Best Swiss Newcomer
LETZTE NACHT
 by Lea Bloch, Switzerland

The Film Verdict at Locarno Film Festival 2023.

The picture opens gloriously. Three leather-clad rockstar kung fu men fall gracefully from the skies. It is the 1970s and the rockstars are on their way from the clouds to the USSR-China border. Upon arrival, they attack Soviet guards—with kicks, swirls, nunchaku, and rock music. At the end of the ruckus, every guard is dead, except for one. You get the picture: it’s quite enough of an insane event to inspire a change of life.

But Rafael doesn’t become a vigilante seeking the deaths of rockstar kung fu fellas. He falls in love with the coolness of their technique, perhaps because, as he later says, “Everything cool is banned in the Soviet Union.”

And so Sarnet’s ridiculous tale truly begins. His film recalls both the Jackie Chan drunken-kung fu films of the 1970s as well as the hyperkinetic Stephen Chow hit, Kung Fu Hustle. As with the latter film, The Invisible Fight has taken a rascally irreverent route to pay homage to a genre that has always paired physically impressive actions with comedy. But Sarnet’s take is too European, too arthouse-y to attract Chow’s sizable audience. He is much too given to sacrificing coherence for gimmickry. For much of the film’s first half, the main thing is fun and silliness.

The presumed depths possible with Rafael’s quest to find something wholesome (or, well, something distracting) from his night of terror is overwritten with an extreme jokiness comprised of Black Sabbath’s ear-splitting music and over-soundtracked gestures. The upshot is a project that will alienate many viewers. But some will, in the manner of the film’s protagonist, become believers or enthusiasts. Already the film, which premiered at Locarno, has made believers out of the aggregators LevelK.

Back to the plot. Somehow, Rafael finds himself at a monastery where another phase of his life begins. He wants to become a monk. Is the connection between monastic living and kung fu kicking buffoonery? Or is monkish living a salve for trauma? Who knows? Our hero is paired with a monk named Irinei (played with zen and occasional aw-shucks by Kaarel Pogga). The relationship between the men becomes a subplot. Another subplot involves a love interest, Rita, for whom Rafael receives a black eye during one of the film’s early quirky fights.

Running a few minutes under 2 hours, there’s a lot that The Invisible Fight could leave in the editing suite. But this isn’t a film of restraint—not even in terms of themes. Religion, international politics, asceticism, wuxia, feminism all get cameos. The film’s star is never in doubt. As Rafael, Ursel Tilk is game for everything in Sarnet’s screenplay.

His pale face, erratic teeth, and crazed expressions are given pride of place several times on the screen. The man is clearly committed to his role. But it does feel like he has given an award-worthy performance in a film too weird, too silly, too pointless for any awards. But he should be proud of his enthusiastic portrayal of a character whose witlessness he conveys with a single-minded clarity of purpose. Tilk gives himself wholly to the chaos of Sarnet’s mind.

Towards the end of the film, we get a “dance”, which involves the wonderfully crimson-lipped Rita. At that point, Sarnet is simply throwing whatever his remarkably fertile imagination can generate on the wall. But the goal isn’t to see what sticks. Nothing does. The Estonian director seems to only want to hear the squishy-squishy sounds of his ideas hitting a solid surface and then falling to the floor. He seems convinced that for certain viewers that will be enough. Across the many film festivals of Europe, he will be proven right.

Mátalos a todos de Sebastian Molina Ruiz’s combina estética grunge en video con elementos epistolares para explorar el sentimiento adolescente de aislamiento.

Aunque es evidente muy pronto en la acción que Mila (Mila Mijangos) y María (María Villanueva) nunca se han conocido en persona, la naturaleza de la floreciente relación entre ambas es un tanto  ambigua. Entonces, el plan es consumar en persona durante el verano una amistad que se ha desarrollado en línea.  En ese momento la banda musical de María se presentará y habrá un boleto a esperando a Mila en la puerta. A través de la preparación y representación de este escenario, Molina Ruiz crea un drama discreto pero conmovedor que insinúa varias inseguridades y aflicciones que afectan a sus jóvenes protagonistas, y un trastorno más innato que parece ser parte integrante, territorio de la vida contemporánea, transitoria y digital.

Molina Ruiz abre la película con video digital granuloso, filmado por las dos chicas mientras se envían presentaciones. “Valentina me dijo que casi nunca publico fotos”, explica María, por lo que quiere asegurarse de que Mila la reconozca. Estos perfiles de video están llenos de pequeñas preocupaciones sobre su apariencia, sobre el valor de lo que están diciendo; la reserva subyacente, particularmente en el caso de Mila, parece ser sobre su valor. Es Mila con quien se queda la película cuando terminan los segmentos autograbados. Con ojo de documentalista, el director y su director de fotografía, Ángel Jara Taboada, capturan los discretos patrones de la vida de Mila mientras patina por calles desiertas y agrega tímidamente su nombre a un grafiti en un parque venido a menos de la ciudad.

Al nunca mostrar a la audiencia la realidad de la vida de María más allá de lo que presenta en su video, tenemos que formar nuestras conclusiones de la misma manera que debe hacerlo Mila. En un mensaje narrado, Mila describe un sueño en el que sus ansiedades se yuxtaponen con la autoconfianza de María. Incluso antes de alejarse del concierto crucial sin entrar, incluso antes de llamar a un exnovio para que la consuele y luego huir de él llorando, su incertidumbre es evidente. Mucho antes de su inquietante coda en la que Mila revela el suicidio de un compañero de clase y especula sobre el impacto que tendría su propia salida de un lugar, o incluso dejar de existir, la película presenta un retrato finamente calibrado de un malestar peculiar e indefinible, uno que se insinúa pero se pasa por alto en las imágenes grabadas en video. La distancia entre lo que deseamos ser, lo que no queremos ser y, en última instancia, lo que somos se prueba aquí con delicadeza y equilibrio.

Director: Sebastian Molina Ruiz
Elenco: Mila Mijangos, María Villanueva, Derek Curiel
Productores: Sebastian Molina Ruiz, Daniela Mosca, Diandra Arriaga
Fotografìa: Ángel Jara Taboada
Edición: Andrea Rabasa, Sebastian Molina Ruiz
Sonido: Talia Ruiz Tovar, Miguel Angel Molina Gutierrez
Diseño y mezcla de sonido: Tristan Lhomme
Producción: Colectivo Colmena (Mexico)
Muestra: Locarno Film Festival (Pardi di domani: Concorso Corti d’autore)
En español
19 minutos

Sebastian Molina Ruiz’s Kill ‘Em All combines grungy video aesthetics and epistolary elements to explore a sense of teenage isolation.

The nature of the burgeoning relationship between Mila (Mila Mijangos) and María (María Villanueva) remains somewhat ambiguous, but it is quickly evident that they have never met. As such, the plan is to consummate an online friendship in person during the summer, when María’s band are playing a gig and Mila has a ticket waiting for her at the door. Through the build-up to and depiction of this scenario, Molina Ruiz creates an understated but affecting drama that hints at various insecurities and maladies afflicting its young protagonists, and a more innate dislocation that seems to as part and parcel of a transitory, digital, contemporary life.

Molina Ruiz opens the film with grainy digital video, filmed by the two girls themselves as they send introductions to one another. “Valentina told me I almost never post photos,” explains María, so she wants to be sure Mila would recognise her. These video profiles are filled with minor qualms about their appearances, about the value of what they’re saying – the underlying reservation, particularly in Mila’s case, seems to be about her value. It is Mila with whom the film remains when the self-recorded segments finish. With a documentarian’s eye, the director and his DoP, Ángel Jara Taboada, capture the discreet patterns of Mila’s life as she skates along deserted streets and sheepishly adds her name to the graffiti in a rundown city park.

By never showing the audience the reality of María’s life beyond that which she presents in her video, we’re left to form our conclusions in much the same way that Mila must. In a narrated message, Mila describes a dream where her anxieties are starkly juxtaposed against María’s self-assurance. Even before she turns away from the pivotal gig without going inside, even before she calls an ex-boyfriend for comfort and then flees him in tears, her uncertainty is evident. Long before its disquieting coda in which Mila reveals the suicide of a classmate and speculates about the impact her departure from a place, or even ceasing to exist, would have, the film presents a finely calibrated portrait of a peculiar, indefinable malaise – one that is hinted at but glossed over in the videoed footage. The distance between who we wish to be, want not to be, and ultimately who we are is probed here with delicacy and poise.

Directors: Sebastian Molina Ruiz
Cast: Mila Mijangos, María Villanueva, Derek Curiel
Producers: Sebastian Molina Ruiz, Daniela Mosca, Diandra Arriaga
Cinematography: Ángel Jara Taboada
Editing: Andrea Rabasa, Sebastian Molina Ruiz
Sound: Talia Ruiz Tovar, Miguel Angel Molina Gutierrez
Sound design, sound mixing: Tristan Lhomme
Production: Colectivo Colmena (Mexico)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Pardi di domani: Concorso Corti d’autore)
In Spanish
19 minutes

The time between the two films has allowed for a maturing of vision, with Excursion offering subtle and astute food for thought on what it means to come of age in a Bosnian society grappling to break free from the hardships of past generations, in which a legacy of fear simmers under the surface of public life. Gunjak explores, in a sensitive drama richly textured with detail, how a strong patriarchal bias leaves young women vulnerable to sexual double standards and a rumour mill of insatiable gossip that limits their ability for playful exploration and self-determination. 

Iman (played with just the right mix of impulsivity and nervy self-doubt by Asja Zara Lagumdzija) is something of a misfit among her middle-school peers, her short crop of pink-tinted hair setting her apart in a tide of more classic femininity. Her huge crush on Damir, a slightly older boy who has shown a casual interest in her, is a source of obsessive anxiety. As he chats up other girls in the graffiti-daubed playground where the kids gather at night to drink, skate and posture, she can sense him slipping away from her — even though he had no qualms about lying to his friends that they had slept together. A white lie spirals into something far more serious, with potentially grave repercussions, as she claims in a game of “Truth or Dare” to have lost her virginity. Enjoying the sudden rush of attention, she then lets everyone believe she is pregnant. 

Gunjak has a sensitive ear and eye for the fickle, shifting intensities of adolescent peer connection and the way moral judgments form and spread by mob rule and contagious societal panic. Her friends are curious and condemnatory about her false confession of sexual experience in equal measure, wanting to know every detail, even as they soon move to ostracise her in an “anti-Iman” online chat group. Particularly impressive is the way Gunjak captures the vivid teenage fantasy life that is a part of burgeoning identity formation, the imagination conjuring up a mental trial-run in preparation for grown-up realities and relationships to come, as kids feel out through imitation how they might become an adult someday.

For Iman, whose solar-system bedroom wallpaper surrounds her in an outgrown realm of childlike make-believe, her lie is simply a way to maintain her closeness to Damir and prolong the illusion that he is her boyfriend, by substantiating his story in the eyes of others. It’s the little power that she has, in a film that, with feminist indignation, shows coming of age for Iman as an initiation into sexual objectification at the whim of the man she is looking for love and validation from.  

Aside from the practicalities of what a pregnancy at her age would mean for her future, Iman’s reputation hangs in the balance. While Damir stays free of consequences, she is asked not to attend religious studies class until her predicament is resolved, and even requested to consider changing schools, as she becomes persona non grata in all but official terms. In no time, the school scandal of Iman’s possible pregnancy embroils parents and teachers, who have already been in tense meetings about the destination for an upcoming excursion. Italy has been voiced as an option, but aside from the expense, parents question safety. The story of Serbian schoolgirls from Banja Luka who all got pregnant on a class trip has already been doing the rounds, whipping parents into a fever-pitch of outrage about what might happen if adolescents abroad escape round-the-clock supervision. Determining the truth and claiming control of the narrative are dangerous games in Excursion, where trust is low and there is everything to lose.

Director, screenwriter: Una Gunjak
Cast: Asja Zara Lagumdzija, Nada Spaho, Maja Izetbegovic, Mediha Musliovic, Izudin Bajrovi
Producers: Amra Baksic Camo, Adis Dapo
Cinematography: Matthias Pilz
Editor: Clemence Diard
Production companies: SCCA/pro.ba (Bosnia), Nukleus Film (Croatia), Bas Celik (Serbia), Salaud Morisset (France), Mer Film (Norway), Doha Film Institute (Qatar)
Sales: Salaud Morisset (France)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival  (BH Film Programme) (also in Locarno)
In Bosnian
93 minutes

Reflecting the rage and anger in Iranian society, particularly among young people, in the distorting mirror of speeding cars and strung out toxic excess, here is a film that takes allegory to exciting and frequently uncomfortable extremes.  It is hard to believe such a direct screenplay, one filled with harsh obscenities and a protracted female orgasm, could have been shot in Iran. Its frankness  can only be compared to last year’s festival hit Holy Spider — but that was a Euro coproduction shot in Jordan.

It is a slippery film to grab hold of in the early scenes, where elegant long takes and repetitions are the order of the day, and a bit puzzling in the middle. But the film gathers momentum as it goes along to culminate in two dazzling, unforgettable scenes of drug trips gone awry. Its ambience and taboo-breaking should speak particularly to young local audiences, who are very unlikely to see it in film theaters.

Sadly, Critical Zone will have its world premiere in Locarno’s international competition without the director and screenwriter Ali Ahmadzadeh (Kami’s Party 2013, Atom Heart Mother 2015). That story is here.  But despite mounting pressure from Iran that the film be withdrawn and its screening canceled, the Locarno festival, the director and his German-based producer Sina Ataeian Dena have stood firm. Further festival screenings and possible release through Luxbox can be expected to attract a lot of attention to this bold and disconcerting vision of hell.

There is an air of desperation, even self-destruction in Amir (Amir Pousti), a cocky, single-minded pusher who has something lethal for everyone in his big bag of tricks. Behind his curly brown hair and beard, his pupils are dilated. He races around town in a nondescript car which we barely glimpse, because Ahmadzadeh disconcertingly puts the camera in the driver’s seat. Like a video game, the viewer is behind the wheel with the protagonist as he follows ghostly instructions from a voice navigator (a suave woman’s voice) to turn left and right and make U-turns; sometimes to watch out for police and danger ahead. There is definitely something supernatural about these orders, as he goes about his devilish business.

Despite the evil nestled inside him, we feel close to Amir, thanks to all the narrative devices Ahmadzadeh uses to make us identify with the daredevil pusher. One quintessential shot is over the steering wheel as he navigates the empty highways and streets of the city at high speed, passing cars on the left and right in fast motion cinematography. When Amir is really in an altered state, the camera spins 360°, turning him upside down. The adrenaline is there.

Innovative as it is, the story revolves around that iconic location of modern Iranian art films (Kiarostami, Panahi, etc.): a moving vehicle. In the three-minute opening long take, we recognize another trope, the empty highway tunnel that seems to stretch into infinity in ever-dwindling perspective. Here this familiar backdrop of Iranian drama is particularly mysterious and sinister, desaturated of almost all color and seen from the perspective of a wailing ambulance whose mission remains unclear. Finally the shot shifts to a driver in a car (Amir) nervously smoking a joint as he maneuvers out of range of police cars.

Somewhat bizarrely, the film is listed as “sci fi” in the Locarno press material, which may place a futuristic fig leaf over some of the more unlikely scenes. As Amir meets customers and acquaintances, scenes play out with so little dialogue that it’s mostly a guessing game and hard to know what’s going on. At one point he bakes magic brownies stuffed with either hashish or marijuana and, with the aid of a sultry young nurse, distributes them to the residents of a home for the elderly. Why? They hardly look like returning customers.

His visit to another young woman in a black leotard, who teaches a dance class to children, seems aimed at getting her to return home to him – despite the fact (he hints) that he is unable to make love to her. “Sleep with who you want,” he urges her. “Just come home.” One suspects his own addiction has taken its toll on his body, as it has on several of his emotionally ravaged customers.

The pace picks up dramatically in two long, memorable scenes. After driving a self-assured young woman to the airport and selling her a substantial quantity of drugs, which she nonchalantly throws in her suitcase, Amir picks up an airlines flight assistant. Her initial primness dissolves into something quite different when they drive into an empty field with the headlights off.

After the drugs and alcohol, sex is next on the agenda – but as has been established, Amir is impotent and unable to perform. He can only listen to what she is experiencing (offscreen) on the seat beside him, very vocally and without inhibition, magnified out of all proportion into something between an orgasmic shriek and an existential howl.  It is loud enough to attract the police. The chase scene that follows is one of the most extraordinary in Iranian cinema, shot in the dark with perfect timing and manic energy. And this is not the end – Amir will more clearly reveal the man he really is in a dramatic final scene, a scary encounter with a teenage addict whose eyes are already dead.

Much of the film’s impact comes from its visual and audio special effects. Talented D.P. Abbas Rahimi drains every shot of superfluous color, achieving a chilling sort of nighttime uniformity, while composer Milad Movahedi (Endless Dreams, Forbidden Womanhood) surprises with a wide range of lovely contemporary music. The sound team works overtime on the centrality of unexpected repeated sounds, like repeated electronic pings and, of course, the omniscient talking navigator.

The Film Verdict at Locarno Film Festival 2023.

Director, screenwriter: Ali Ahmadzadeh
Cast: Amir Pousti, Shirin Abendinirad, Alireza Keymanesh, Maryam Sadeghyan, Sagar Saharkhiz, Mina Hasanlou, Alireza Rastjou
Producers: Sina Ataeian Dena, Ali Ahmadzadeh
Dramaturgical advisor: Sina Ataeian Dena
Cinematography: Abbas Rahimi
Music: Milad Movahedi
Sound: Mehdi Behboodi
Sound design: Hasan Mahdavi
Production company: Counter Intuitive Film  
World sales: Luxbox 
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Concorso internazionale)
In Farsi
99 minutes

The film starts with a framed photo of Lousy Carter (David Krumholz), his peculiar name never addressed, with a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald describing Jay Gatsby as someone with “an extraordinary gift for hope.” Professor Carter has made a specialty out of The Great Gatsby, but the description doesn’t fit him at all: he’s a schlub of a figure with an extraordinary gift for disappointing people, himself most of all. Once an animation filmmaker who hoped for a bright career, Lousy is now financially strapped and trapped teaching students he doesn’t care about. At the film’s start his indifferent doctor informs him he has six months to live, setting off a re-evaluation of his life that begins by falling off the wagon.

His one confidante is his ex gf Candela (Olivia Thirlby), a no-nonsense beauty with no interest in humoring his self-pity, though she does suggest that a good way to get out of his current funk is to sleep with one of his students. It’s probably better advice than he gets from his Jungian therapist (Stephen Root assuming a parody of a Mitteleuropean accent), who hasn’t even begun to explore Lousy’s poor relationship with his hyper-critical alcoholic wheelchair-bound mother (Mona Lee Fultz). Even Lousy’s best friend, humorless Russian lit professor Herschel Kaminsky (Martin Starr) is less than supportive, though at least an affair with Herschel’s wife (Jocelyn DeBoer) offers some pleasant distraction.

So too does grad student Gail (Luxy Banner, in a notable debut), the only one of his Gatsby seminar students who seems remotely interested in the topic, but even more important for Lousy is that she enjoys, in a very deadpan Gen Z kind of way, toying with his expectations. By far the most interesting of the film’s sparky sardonic slingers, Gail passively agrees to be the model for Carter’s desired animated adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark, despite knowing full well that the underachiever will never get it off the ground.

Underneath the casual witty retorts and detached humor is a sad-sack of a man whose ambitions lie puddled on the floor, metaphorically using a spoon like the boy in St. Augustine’s legend trying to empty out the sea and gather it back up again. The problem for those unaccustomed to this kind of American indie filmmaking is that it feels as if everyone is in a suburban vacuum, gently and generously being joshed. We can admire Byington’s clear affection for these characters, together with the sympathy he gives to their struggles, yet anyone wanting a sharp-edged satire will be disappointed. There are good-natured laughs at easy targets, derived from a bemused look at the immediate world around him, but that’s pretty much it. Perhaps that’s enough for hardcore fans.

As for the filming, the persistent use of shot-counter shot in almost all conversations makes it feel as if the actors aren’t even in the same room together when the camera is on, with the result that we never feel a genuine connection between anyone. That’s likely one of Byington’s points, since no relationship here is believable anyway, but it significantly hamstrings any identification with these people. Also peculiar is the hesitant insertion of music, especially one recurrent tune used so softly in the sound mix that it ironically feels bothersomely intrusive.

Director, screenplay: Bob Byington
Cast: David Krumholz, Olivia Thirlby, Martin Starr, Jocelyn DeBoer, Luxy Banner, Stephen Root, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Shelby Surdham, Andrew Bujalski, Macon Blair, Mona Lee Fultz, Lee Eddy, Randy Aguebor
Producers: Bob Byington, Chris McKenna
Executive producers: Stuart Bohart, Tim League
Cinematography: Carmen Hilbert, Lauren Pruitt
Production designer: Iman Corbani
Costume designer: Olivia Mori
Editing: Kris Boustedt
Music: Leafcuts
Sound: Kris Boustedt
Production company: American Brutto (USA)
World sales: UTA
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (International competition)
In English
76 minutes

Szabó is attending Locarno Film Festival this week to receive an honorary Golden Leopard prize and introduce his most recent feature, Final Report (2020), a wry, elegiac, semi-autobiograophical reflection on creeping old age and political hypocrisy. This minor-key autumnal drama reunites the director with his friend and long-time collaborator Klaus Maria Brandauer, a potent Austro-Hungarian double act first forged more than 40 years on the majestic Oscar-winner Mephisto (1981), in which Brandauer plays an ambitious German stage actor whose moral compass is warped by his growing success during Hitler’s rise to power. “Vanity is the artist’s weakness,” the veteran director told Film Philosophy magazine in 2002, “it enables seduction.”

Even in his early directing days, Szabó was a forensic examiner of how people in repressive dictatorships, from ordinary citizens to famous artists, make their own tricky moral compromises with murderous regimes. One of his earliest stand-out films, the autobiographer coming-of-age drama Father (1966), casts a cynical eye on national myth-making in the wake of the bloody Hungarian uprising of 1956, which was brutally put down by the Soviet army. Earning the director his first Academy Award nomination, Confidence (1980) examines the fragile nature of love and trust in Nazi-occupied Hungary. For Szabó, fatherhood and fatherland are both emotionally stirring notions that require rigorous interrogation.

Szabó, who has distant Jewish ancestry and lost several relatives in the Holocaust, has returned to themes of antisemitism and Nazi collaboration many times, notably in the lavish period dramas Colonel Redl (1985), Hanussen (1988) and Taking Sides (2001). But often these historical dramas were thinly disguised allegories for the agonising double lives of Hungarians living under Communism. Moral complexity in difficult circumstances has always been central to Szabo’s vision. “Life is not a fairy tale like the ones you heard as a child,” he said in 2002. “You cannot decide between black and white because black and white doesn’t exist.”

Kudos is also due to Szabó for confidently navigating a new cinematic landscape following the collapse of Soviet Communism. With the decline of state-subsidised cinema in Eastern Europe, he launched a new international phase of his career with a series of mostly English-language dramas. He worked with Glenn Close on the backstage operatic farce Meeting Venus (1991), with an Oscar-nominated Annette Bening on Being Julia (2004), with Helen Mirren on sombre literary two-hander The Door (2012), and more. But his mid-career masterpiece is probably his most personal, directing triple versions of Ralph Feinnes in the richly novelistic, generation-spanning Hungarian family saga Sunshine (1999).

In a gripping late-career plot twist that echoes one if his key dramatic concerns, it emerged in 2006 that Szabó was recruited by Hungary’s Communist-era security services in his youth to inform on his fellow film and theatre school students. This was during the crackdown following the 1956 uprising, and was essentially an act of blackmail. “I was arrested with two school friends,” Szabó confessed to the Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság. “We were questioned for three days and nights. Eventually I was forced to sign a statement saying I would work with the secret police.”

Kudos to Szabó for not trying to dodge or fudge these prickly issues when they came to light. Indeed, like one of his morally complex characters, he insists he made this Faustian pact for noble reasons, partly to help save the life of a classmate who had opposed Russian forces during the 1956 revolution. “The work for the secret police was the bravest and most fearless of my life,” he boldly claimed.

After facing criticism at home over these revelations, Szabó declined a lifetime achievement award from the Hungarian Film Academy. But to his credit, he seems to have survived this potentially damaging episode with his gilded international reputation largely intact. While some film-makers merely chronicle the darker chapters of history, Szabó lived through several of them, and has spent the last 60 years drawing painful wisdom from the experience. This is both his blessing and his burden. “I don’t think that you can separate art and politics,” he said in 2002, “because politics is life.”

The Film Verdict at Locarno Film Festival 2023.

Alexandre Mattiussi’s fashion house is no strangers to artistic collaboration, having launched a touring exhibition in collaboration with Magnum in 2022. There, a dozen photographers and video artists were given carte blanche to interpret the theme of ‘family.’ Granted similar freedom, Demange’s new film explores his own roots – spread between Algiers, Paris, and London – through a theatrically mounted short that splinters an overarching narrative of romance and self-identification into something impressionistic and experiential.

What narrative there is involves Riz Ahmed’s character narrating a desire to somehow change his past through repeated visits back to Paris to see his Algerian father who stayed there when his mother took him to the UK. At the time of doing that, he left his Arabic name, Mounir, behind – notably, ‘Mounir’ has been restored to the director’s name in the credits for the film – and now, when he comes back to France, he finds himself pulled between these three (national) identities. During one evening in a local bar with his father’s friends, Mounir meets Hafzia (Souheila Yacoub), who shows him a way to be in Paris as an Algerian, but this only serves to stoke the fires of his internal conflict.

The debates seem to rage within Mounir and between him and Hafzia – recriminations are laid at one another’s feet as well as at those of Mounir’s parents (played by Isabelle Adjani and Yousfi Henine). This happens through a constantly shifting landscape in which Ahmed and Yacoub traverse the geographies of realistic Parisian locations and minimalist stage sets. As if existing on the permeable boundaries between the internal and external worlds, they drift from inhabiting traditional dramatic fiction to arguing within some fabricated Brechtian dreamscape peopled by dancing troupes or obscured by an enveloping fog. The effect is tantalising and although the form denies the imperative to follow a plot, the palimpsest of dialogue scraps builds into a single colossal wave breaking against the psyche. Here, the various modes, moments, and mutterings coalesce into a fascinating portrayal of interior strife – Dammi is an excellent study of the dissonances and force of mind required to resolve a contested sense of identity.

Director: Yann Mounir Demange
Screenplay: Yann Mounir Demange, Rosa Attab
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Souheila Yacoub, Isabelle Adjani, Sandor Funtek
Producers: Alexandre Mattiussi, Gary Farkas, Clément Lepoutre, Olivier Muller
Cinematography: Paul Özgür, Benoït Soler
Editing: Rich Orrick
Music: Oliver Coates
Costume: Alexandre Mattiussi
Choreography: Josepha Madoki
Production: AMI Paris (France), Vixens (France), Wayward Films (UK/US)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Piazza Grande)
In English, French
19 minutes

One of the issues is that she tries to create a liminal space between Lisbon and Bangkok, destabilizing viewers’ expectations of time and place in a manner far more ambitious than she’s able to handle. Rather than create a kind of memory palimpsest offering insight into a sense of displacement for both women, Teles melds the two cities and in so doing globalizes them too, in a negative way. In addition, she plops songs in at random, including “I Feel for You” and “Voyage Voyage,” in a manner that may be meaningful to her, but their arbitrariness as well as their placement simply leave the viewer perplexed.

L (Carolina Miragaia) is a mannish newbie at a small architectural firm who apparently just broke up with her boyfriend, or perhaps he ended things with her: there’s a close-up of them embracing where only her face is seen as she sings Banks’ “Fuck Em Only We Know.” Well, only they do know, since we don’t know much other than that things ended and she’s not confiding in her best friend. Then she meets graphic designer K (Meghna Lall), a Canadian of Thai birth just arrived in Lisbon via Singapore and London. There’s an immediate attraction between the two women, their flirtation made grandiose in an unnecessary and cheap recreation of the overpass scene in Millenium Mambo, followed by spray-painting trite slogans on a wall. Then one day K suddenly leaves and L falls apart, keying cars on the street and nearly sabotaging her job by insulting a couple of insufferable American clients who, admittedly, deserve to be ridiculed (though they’re made far too easy a target).

Baan shows Lisbon as a city of migrants whose multiracial residents (Pakistani shop owner, Far East Asian emigres, etc.) are frequently targets of abuse: how do you call a place “home” if you’re not made to feel you belong? It’s an important question to ask, and deserves considered exploration, yet the film’s superficial investment in the problem ultimately takes a back-seat to L’s crush on K, making it seem like a case of untrammeled white guilt trying to overcompensate by offering the supposed salvation of L herself as the true home. K would have been the more interesting character to delve into, but since L appears to be something of a stand-in for the director herself, she’s the one we follow, to the film’s detriment since she’s simply not interesting or sympathetic enough.

The hard digital quality of the visuals doesn’t help matters, especially at the start when the observational camera tends to keep the characters at a distance. The film’s unnecessary length and occasional slow-mo inserts, together with the haphazard use of well-known songs, give the impression that multiple programming tools were being tried out, adding to the overall sense of an undisciplined work whose potentially interesting message can’t survive the banal, poorly delivered dialogue.

Director: Leonor Teles
Screenplay: Leonor Teles, Ágata de Pinho, Francisco Mira Godinho
Cast: Carolina Miragaia, Meghna Lall, Filipa Falcao, Filipa Reis, Joao Miller Guerra, Carolina Varela, Simao Marinho, MD Saleman
Producer: Filipa Reis
Cinematography: Leonor Teles
Production designer: Sandra T.
Editing: Lívia Serpa, Sandra T.
Sound: Rafael Gonçalves Cardoso, Joana Niza Braga
Production company: Uma Pedra no Sapato (Portugal)
World sales: Totem Films
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (International competition)
In Portuguese, English
102 minutes

It’s the location of a hasty midnight appointment made by the anxious Pascal (Vincent Macaigne) after he sees their television advertisement in which they claim to create ghosts, so people can continue beyond their natural demise. Pascal has inadvertently discovered he is about to die whilst preparing the layout of tomorrow’s edition of the newspaper he works at – and stumbling upon his pre-written death notice. Now he hopes that these people may be able to extend his experiences beyond their tragically short 45 years.

This isn’t the first time that Frenkel and Castro have imagined such a strange service. Their first collaboration, on their 2017 short Adieu Bohème, was centred around a team who offered couples the chance to stage beautifully romantic goodbyes. Here, the offering from iNTELLIGENCE is far more arcane, some unfathomable procedure that transfers consciousness into a picture frame that can continue on indefinitely. The somewhat fantastical nature of this proposition is reflected in the film’s dreamlike visual style, which shoots its actors and then incorporates them into an atmospheric, deconstructed, animated world. Pascal is a designer, and the reality he inhabits seems to almost have spilt from his consciousness. The aesthetic constantly morphs between blocky graphic approximations, chiaroscuro screen prints, line-drawn backgrounds that could be slates from comic panels, paint pigment dispersing in water like lava lamps and familiar-looking collage in which the chairs in a reception area seem to have been cut and pasted from a catalogue.

The film is already presented using this visual style before Pascal makes his prophetic discovery – upon overhearing colleagues discussing his forthcoming passing – but it feels innately entwined with his subsequent spiral into despair. He chastises himself for putting things off, for allowing life to pass him by with the assumption his time was limitless, and wrangles with the nature of dying as a forgotten footnote in other people’s stories. The weirdness of the noirish world around him emphasises Pascal’s existing disconnection as well as conjuring a sense of some purgatorial unreality that he currently, and now perhaps forever will, occupy. It’s a brilliant technique for a film about the implications of death – of a fear of being gone and the incomprehensible nature of a world in which we no longer exist.

Directors, screenplay, editing: Jeanne Frenkel, Cosme Castro
Cast: Vincent Macaigne, Alma Jodorowsky, Stanley Weber
Producer: Sarah Derny
Cinematography: Hovig Hagopian
Sound: Adriano Cerone
Sound design, sound mixing: Tristan Lhomme
Music: Jacques
Production company: Envie de Tempête Productions (France)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Pardi di domani: Concorso Corti d’autore)
In French
14 minutes

Renzo Rossellini is the recipient of the Locarno Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which will be conferred on August 10.

Beginning his career as an assistant to his father and other directors in the 1960’s, he went on to produce some 64 movies and became the influential head of Gaumont Italia from 1977 to 1983. He has been associated with such memorable international productions as Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), Werner Herzog’s 1982 adventure Fitzcarraldo, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Italian-set Nostalghia (1983), Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984) and the Mickey Rourke-Kim Basinger erotic romance 9 ½ Weeks (1986).

His contribution to Italian cinema, in particular, has been enormous: Francesco Rosi’s Carmen and Three Brothers, Gianni Amelio’s Strike at the Heart, Fellini’s The Ship Sails On, Orchestra Rehearsal and City of Women, Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman, Ettore Scola’s That Night in Varennes, Mario Monicelli’s Il marchese del Grillo, Nanni Moretti’s Sweet Dreams, Marco Ferreri’s Chiedo Asilo, Franco Brusati’s Dimenticare Venezia and Liliana Cavani’s The Skin.

Before plunging into producing full-time, the young Renzo worked for over a decade as a director. In 1962 he shot one of the episodes of Love at Twenty in the company of Francois Truffaut and Andrzej Wajda, then turned his hand to documentaries like the RAI TV series The Age of Iron (1964) and Man’s Struggle for Survival (1970), which made use of texts by his father Roberto.

It was in the 1960’s and 70’s when Renzo’s political commitment came to the fore, along with other leftist filmmakers and artists. He represented the Algerian Liberation Front at a conference in Havana promoted by Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whose aim was to found a liberation movement uniting Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Italy, he became a member of the new-left group Avanguardia Operaia and created – along with director Mario Monicelli, future Nobel playwright Dario Fo and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini – the National Committee against Fascism in the Mediterranean.

A key moment was the foundation of Radio Città Futura, one of Italy’s first free radio stations created after the liberalization of the airways in 1976. It was founded by Renzo and publisher Giulio Savelli with the support of a number of leftist political groups. Soon afterwards, he was elected president of the Federation of Democratic Radio Broadcasters.

The death of his father in 1977 marked a return to cinema for Renzo, who became president of Gaumont Italia, a branch of the French company. During his tenure he produced and distributed over 100 titles. He is particularly remembered for transforming old Italian movie palaces with thousands of lumpy seats into modern multiplexes with A/C. With production, distribution and exhibition all under one banner, the company’s rise was rapid. He also founded a film school that was to prepare many illustrious alumni.

At the same time, his association with Radio Città Futura continued and, in the red-hot political climate of the time, he was accused of predicting the tragic kidnapping of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro shortly before it occurred. Only in 2017 did Renzo reveal the source of his information to be a Palestinian who told him that members of Italy’s urban terrorists, the Red Brigades, were being trained in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, in a place that resembled a sound stage, for a very big action.

Violence brushed him personally in 1979 when a neo-fascist group attacked and burned the offices of Radio Città Futura, wounding five women with gunfire. Two years later, when Soviet troops occupied Afghanistan, Renzo became an active member of a non-violent group that included French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, opposing the Soviet occupation. Making a secret trip to Afghanistan, Renzo brought radio transmitters and know-how for the local resistance movement.

Back in Italy, he was, for several months, shadowed by the Red Brigades, who planned to kidnap him. They are said to have abandoned the plan only because he was armed. But in 1984, he and his wife Elisabetta Caracciolo were driving near Rome when two cars pushed their vehicle off a cliff. His wife was killed and Renzo sustained serious injuries.

That year Renzo left Gaumont to found the distribution company Artisti Associati, which released the hit 9 ½ Weeks. Today he is president of the Roberto Rossellini Cultural Association for the Spread of Knowledge and has been active in conserving and re-releasing the work of his father Roberto.

The Film Verdict at Locarno Film Festival 2023.

Another issue is that Bozzelli overplays his hand with visual clues, including the opening and closing shots of fences and cages: yes, we get it, the whole film is about metaphorical cages, but just a few real ones will be enough to get the point across. Yuri (Andrea Fuorto) is 19, or perhaps 20, an orphan working the cash register at the family butcher shop and shuttled month-by-month between his three aunts, who house and feed him near the Abruzzi city of Teramo. He’s also developmentally delayed, barely able to do simple math and clearly socially backward. He’s teased by children and his aunt Anna (Marina Catia Lamperi) not only infantilizes but still bathes him.

At his younger cousin’s birthday party Yuri becomes fascinated by Agostino (Augusto Mario Russi), an itinerant birthday clown whose pierced lip and nipple and dyed hair, not to mention the sneer, mark him instantly as a bad boy. Agostino immediately senses that Yuri is slow and a target for the crueler kids, so he ropes him in as an assistant and then proceeds to humiliate him. For Yuri, it hurts but it’s also par for the course, and when Agostino teasingly calls him “empathetic,” a word Yuri needs to look up, the younger man decides to free himself from the family shackles, setting out at night to follow the caravan-living Svengali with the stuffed animal he gave him.

Agostino loves to give off the aura of a man with no ties, completely free in his caravan to go where he pleases and do what he wants. He burns what he doesn’t need and talks about going to Patagonia, an idea planted in his head by his father’s love for the José Larralde song “Patagonia.” He also likes to play power games, assuming a dominant-submissive relationship with Yuri that carries a palpable sexual vibe. His pansexuality is another manifestation (we’re meant to believe) of his free-spirited nature, though Yuri is slow to understand the dynamic, at first just happy to be in the thrall of this charismatic figure who lets him share his caravan and makes him his assistant.

They wind up parking among a community of ravers who stage a kind of pygmy Burning Man – it’s a world the boy from Teramo never imagined, exciting and confusing like all the stimuli he’s receiving. All of it would work much better if the script knew what it wanted to do with Yuri: at the start he’s clearly intellectually delayed (which doesn’t happen just by being infantilized by an aunt), yet later on he seems to be without issues until towards the end when they reappear. He has the emotional wherewithal to tell Agostino “I always feel like I’m being punished,” which requires some insight, only to once again fall into cluelessness.

Equally problematic is the way Bozzelli handles the sexual relations between the two. We’re shown their bodies close, we’re teased by the arrival of handsome blond animal-loving raver Morgan (Alexander Benigni), and we see Agostino and Yuri apparently naked holding each other in bed. Kissing? No. Sex? Who knows, and an explicit water sports scene is about power and humiliation, not sex. For a film that declares itself to be about freeing ourselves from cages, it remains hypocritically in a cage of its own, seemingly fearful to show same-sex couplings except in the coyest way.

Such script issues are especially galling because in other areas Patagonia works on multiple levels, starting with the spot-on casting. Though young, Fuorto (La prima regola) is a master of subtle facial changes, registering Yuri’s perplexities and hurt, making him a believable character. Russi, in an explosive debut, is all wired energy, manipulating kids at parties as well as vulnerable people like Yuri with a fascinating boundless fluidity that turns out to be less uninhibited than the aura he presents. In addition, Leonardo Mirabilia’s handsome camerawork keeps the restlessness under control, while Christian Marsiglia’s editing maintains the proper vitality and rhythm.

Director: Simone Bozzelli
Screenplay: Tommaso Favagrossa, Simone Bozzelli
Cast: Andrea Fuorto, Augusto Mario Russi, Elettra Dallimore Mallaby, Alexander Benigni, Lina Bartolozzi, Marina Catia Lamperini, Tiziana di Tonno, Sara Giusti, Manuela Derme
Producers: Mario Gianani, Lorenzo Gangarossa
Executive producers: Ludovica Rapisarda, Saverio Guarascio, Mandella Quilici, Gianluca Mizzi
Cinematography: Leonardo Mirabilia
Production designer: Mauro Vanzati
Costume designer: Andrea Cavalletto
Editing: Christian Marsiglia
Music: Leone Ciocchetti, Daniele Guerrini
Sound: Filippo Porcari, Federica Ripani, Alessandro Feletti
Production companies: Wildside (Italy), Vision Distribution with Rai Cinema (Italy), in collaboration with Sky
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (International competition)
In Italian
110 minutes

However, it’s not a copy of the American film in one major way: there are no sex surrogates anywhere here. But its plot does feature a man paralysed from neck down seeking (or acquiescing to) sexual activity.

We meet the protagonists within the first few minutes. Maria (Isold Halldórudóttir) has just resumed a job in which she has to tend to Alex (Stavros Zafeiris), whose lower limbs have muscles no longer in normal use. At this point, there are no real sparks flying, but Rorarius immediately establishes a frank, medically attuned depiction of the body, as an older nurse shows and teaches the younger woman to tend to Alex.

She moves him here and there, then she readies his genitals for the insertion of a catheter. This is shown without the clever blocking Hollywood deploys for these situations. We get a closeup of catheterisation with foreskin, tube and all. It’s a bit shocking to be so frontloaded, but perhaps the idea is to signal the audience: “get comfortable, there’s more nudity coming”. It’s no spoiler to say, for the squeamish or the prudish, that’s as heightened as it gets.

Not long after, Maria becomes enamoured of her patient. Perhaps her being overweight and lonely has something to do with it, but it is regrettable that not much is made of the romantic process. Maria does come to her patient’s rescue when he somehow wheels himself inside the institution’s pool. And yet, it doesn’t feel quite like that is the magic moment when affection dawns. Some connective tissue is missing in the storytelling.

It is doubly puzzling that not much is said about Maria’s background and the reason for her extreme aloneness. She is never shown with friends or family, which seems a bit stingy, given the film’s runtime of over two hours. Surely, some of the overlong scenes could have made way for something more substantial. What we get is Maria starting and ending the film as though her life revolves around her work and her ward, which is possible, but still requires a backdrop.

Alex, on the other hand, ends up better known to us. His story becomes clearer little by little. Unlike in ‘The Sessions’ where the male character had a childhood affliction of polio, in ‘Touched’ the Alex was hit over the head in a fight. The sheer impact of the blow changed his life. This bit of context is probably a detail that signposts Alex’s typically male existence before paralysis. And some pretty typically masculine problems begin to surface in his affair with Maria, although these issues are complicated by a very human frustration stemming from his situation. Maria, inevitably, becomes a vessel for these frustrations. Given her own struggles, it’s a toxic cocktail.

It seems unlikely that ‘Touched’ will have the success of the American film — and not only because Locarno isn’t Sundance and nobody as famous as Helen Hunt is in this tale. The handling of the material is different. Rorarius makes a few directorial choices that nobody will describe as crowd-pleasing or award-beckoning. That is, of course, her prerogative, and her film looks very good and her depiction of masculine vulnerability and female vengeance have the ring of truth. And yet, one leaves it feeling that the material could have yielded much more emotion.

There’s one hitch though: life in the village of Stepne, close to the Russian border, has been one of hardship for centuries. The peasants (the word is used in a non-pejorative sense, as people of the land) have barely changed since the days of serfdom, eking out an existence in an often unforgiving landscape with few resources. The film seems on the fence about whether to mourn this atrophied mode of life, which has carried on for so long not because it’s valued, but because these people were always denied access to advancement of any sort. Trapped in a cycle of poverty, they’ve persisted until finally the young people have abandoned such villages, leaving them inhabited solely by the elderly whose homes are left to rot once they die. Vroda’s ambiguity on this subject is perplexing: is she recording this last gasp in the manner of an anthropologist, or out of nostalgia? The answer is likely an ambivalent mix of the two.

Engineer Anatoliy (Oleksandr Maksiakov), known as Tolya, returns to his elderly mother’s house, knowing she’s unlikely to live much longer. Mariya (Nina Antonova) goes in and out of lucidity though her character remains strong, and a scene where her son reads aloud from her old diaries, in which she recorded weather changes and quotidian things, cleverly conveys an understanding of this resourceful woman in her prime. When she dies, her other son Oleksiy (Oleg Primogenov) also arrives, a security service officer with the face of a bulldog and the comportment to match. The brothers go about preparing the traditional rites and dealing with the house, which will end up shuttered and abandoned like most other dwellings in the village.

“It’s hard to follow the traditions with these wars and revolutions” says Tolya to one of the few remaining men more or less of his generation, but really, the traditions have been atrophying for a multitude of reasons. Just before Mariya dies, she grabs Tolya and asks him if he’s found the treasure she buried under the shed; it drives the brothers to dig a bit, but Vroda hasn’t made a treasure hunt film, and one is left to wonder whether the “treasure” is the land itself, trampled upon by invading armies and jealously nursing the psychological scars inflicted by Stalinism and the horrors of famine and war.

We get a glimpse of this in the film’s best scene, an extended sequence at Mariya’s dinner wake, when wizened-faced villagers gather, happy to have free warm food, discussing their memories filled with deprivation and loss. There’s melancholy but also a surprising degree of humor, especially from 89-year-old Halya, the deep-set lines of her Slavic features bearing witness to a lifetime of hardship, and yet in-between recounting horrors she’s teasing and ironic with the people around her. This is the centerpiece of Stepne, its true heart even though Tolya is a deeply sympathetic figure whose creativity had no outlet in such a place, and who knows there’s little point in openly expressing his affection for Anya (Radmila Schegoleva), the woman who helped look after Mariya and lives several fields away. It’s a tribute to Maksiakov’s skills as an actor that he brings a great deal of emotional depth to such an understated role.

D.p. Andrii Lysetskyi (who also directed the documentary Ivan’s Land) subtly varies the visuals, at first using a handheld camera whose movements are barely noticeable but makes the scene feel like its breathing, and mixes this with fixed shots encompassing the Ukrainian landscape in early winter. Primary colors are almost entirely absent here – apart from some light blue walls, everything is grey or brown, from the trees to the weather-beaten homes, from the clothes to the sky itself, which gives off a cold northern-feeling light. Also absent in this dying region is youth: only the elderly remain, as if waiting to die. During the wake the camera does shift to show to small kids, brought presumably by a neighbor, but their brief presence reinforces the understanding that the only way they’ll survive is to get out, like everyone else.

Director: Maryna Vroda
Screenplay: Maryna Vroda, Kirill Schuvalov
Cast: Oleksandr Maksiakov, Nina Antonova, Oleg Primogenov, Radmila Schegoleva, Volodymyr Yamnenko, Oleksiy Smolka, Serhii Syvokon, Maria Syvokon, Halyna Parfylo, Oleksandra Parfylo, Mykola Parfylo.
Producer: Maryna Vroda
Co-producers: Andrea Wohlfeil, Agnieszka Dziedzic, Jan Naszewski, Marcin Luczaj, Peter
Kerekes
Cinematography: Andrii Lysetskyi
Production designer: Mychailo Alekseenko
Costume designers: Volodymyr Kuznetzov, Oksana Kovtun
Editing: Franziska Wenzel, Maryna Vroda, Marek Sulik
Sound: Igor Jedinák, Lucas Kasprzyk, Sergiy Prokopenko
Production companies: vrodastudio (Ukraine), Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (Germany), Koi Studio (Poland), New Europe Film Sales (Poland), Kerekes Film (Slovakia)
World sales: New Europe Film Sales
Venue: Locarno (International competition)
In Ukrainian, Russian
112 minutes

At the acclaimed filmmaker’s request, we meet at his home in Minusio, near Locarno. It’s a place
that’s very dear to him, as he explains when we first arrive: “Tiziana and I built it. Well, we
had it built. Mainly to her specifications. My main contribution was adding the swings and
the pool.”

Tiziana, his late wife, was a powerhouse in the world of Swiss film production,
including co-productions with Italy (she worked with filmmakers like Alice Rohrwacher and
the D’Innocenzo brothers), and he still sometimes reverts to the present tense when he
mentions her, as though that fateful day in January 2020 never took place. In fact, he still
talks to her every day. They met shortly after Soudani, born in Algeria in 1949, relocated to
Switzerland in his early 20s, first making a name for himself in the Italian-speaking region as
a soccer player. Already trilingual at the time (in addition to Arabic and French, he learned
German in school), he quickly picked up the local dialect – during our conversation, he slips
into Ticinese when he gets particularly carried away – and using it to his advantage: during a
match, he responded to a racist taunt by scoring a goal and then saying to the heckler, “Use
that word again, and I’ll score another one.” So well-integrated is he, he’s commonly known
among friends as “il Dani”, a typical Swiss-Italian nickname.

There’s a reason we’re talking to him: he’s receiving the Locarno Film Festival’s Premio Cinema
Ticino, an award first introduced in 2009 and subsequently given every two years to an
important film professional with ties to Ticino. In 2013, Tiziana Soudani accepted one on
behalf of Amka Films, the production company she and Mohammed founded in 1988. Today,
their daughter Amel, whose name inspired half of the company’s moniker, serves as the CCO
and main producer. (The other half of “Amka” derives from her sister Karima, who works in
the medical field).

“I’ll have both girls with me, in case the prize is too heavy,” Soudani says
with a chuckle. He’s thrilled to receive the award, an acknowledgement for a career spanning
multiple decades, during which he not only produced and directed, but also trained new
generations as a teacher at the two major film schools in Ticino, SUPSI and CISA. “We
worked hard,” he says, referring to his creative partnership with Tiziana, before casting his
mind back to his early days as a cameraman and director of photography. “I had to work hard,
to prove I was up to the task, because even back in Algeria I had to deal with racism. And
once I started working in Ticino, it transpired that I was good enough, because they would give
me gigs at the Arena in Verona and La Scala in Milan.” And while there may have been
frustrations along the way, he’s in a good mood when he remembers them, with one phrase
that pops up regularly during our chat: “I had fun.” Accepting the award in Piazza
Grande, one of the main cultural symbols of the region he’s called home for five
decades, will be even more fun.

The Film Verdict at Locarno Film Festival 2023.

En ‘Todos los incendios’ Mauricio Calderón cumple con el reto de hacer una película coming of age -sensible con interés LGBTQ+ y con un estilo personal.

Todos los países del mundo tienen sus películas coming of age, con el tema de esa oscura, conflictiva y muy cinematográfica etapa por la que los adolescentes transitan en su camino a la adultez. Por desgracia el Hollywood Style ha permeado los formatos locales transformando a los adolescentes en seres élficos – sin acné a la vista- que resuelven sus conflictos -todos solucionables- con mínimo de gritos, y buenas dosis de romance. Todos los incendios, es la respuesta mexicana a este universo adolescente glamourizado.

Bruno  (Sebástian Rojano) el protagonista es un adolescente que vive con su Inés su joven madre viuda (Ximena Ayala); es más bien callado y solitario, algunas veces malicioso, nada que lo distinga  en su aspecto. Su rebeldía adolescente se canaliza en una fascinación -que aún no se convierte en manía- por el fuego. Es seducido por pequeños incendios, como causarlos, filmarlos y compartirlos en Internet, pero no por sus efectos, como lo sería un pirómano.  Se siente además presionado por definir su identidad de género en un ambiente en el que lo LGBTQ+ es repudiado o al menos silenciado. Un intento de beso de Ian (Ari López) su mejor amigo y la presencia Gerardo Héctor Illanes un hombre interesado en su madre son los detonantes para que escape de la ciudad y vaya a buscar a Daniela (Natalia Quiroz), admiradora de sus videos.

Todos los fuegos es el primer largometraje de Mauricio Calderón Rico, autor de cinco cortometrajes muy exhibidos en festivales. Calderón Rico exhibe sensibilidad y templanza para no edulcorar ninguna de las relaciones de Bruno y retratarlas con suficiente espacio para no ser asfixiante. Aunque el uso del fuego como metáfora -de pasión, de olvido, de terminar algo-  es excesivo, hay momentos en los que es hipnotizador. Es notable la escena con un hombre al que Bruno le enciende un cigarro, el timing indica al mismo tiempo una ofrenda y complicidad. Al huir de la ciudad de México, Bruno escapa también de lo complejo del rol masculino en su propia casa y en su vida; y llega a un ambiente en donde las relaciones masculinas se establecen con futbol, sudor y cerveza, sin importar la edad. La película maneja con habilidad esta ironía y hasta propone la idea de que hasta los adultos permisivos solo están separando sus prejuicios.

El director lleva alrededor de 3 años preparando la película, es muy probable que haya decidido permanecer con el mismo actor protagónico, el comportamiento de Bruno es comprensible a los 14 años pero ingenuo para un joven de 16 años habitante de la ciudad de México.  Es increíble que no conozca la palabra “queer”, a menudo escrita “cuir” en español por los activistas.  Como suele ocurrir con las historias coming of age Bruno que está casi siempre en la pantalla; el director solo se concede la libertad de hacer unas pocas escenas sin él que se sienten -en automático- como una conspiración. Solo con esta narrativa focalizada es comprensible que no veamos la desesperación de la madre de Bruno ante su huida. En un país en dónde treinta mil personas han desaparecido en los últimos tres años -la mayoría adolescentes- un escape de este tipo adquiere con rapidez dimensiones alarmantes.

Todos los fuegos no es un incendio, más bien una prometedora llama para el cine sobre adolescentes y temas LGBTQ+. Es notorio el manejo del fuego de parte del director de fotografía Miguel Escudero Torres, que hace que los incendios sean acogedores, amenazantes o divertidos según la ocasión. La película fue producida, con evidente cuidado, cariño y bajo presupuesto, por el colectivo independiente Colmena que ya había presentado el largometraje Mostro en Locarno en 2021.

Dirección y Guion: Mauricio Calderón Rico
Elenco: Sebástian Rojano, Ximena Ayala, Héctor Illanes, Ari López, Natalia Quiroz, Hannah Romen, Antonio Fortier, Iliana Donatlán.
Productores: Daniel Loustaunau, Francisco Sánchez, Araceli Velázquez
Fotografía: Miguel Escudero Torres
Edición: Marlén Ríos-Farjat
Música: Turista Universal, Santiago Mijares, Jorge Santos, Mónica Saldaña, Stefanía Kirnbauer, Héctor Vázquez
Sonido directo: Irina Guadarrama Olhovich
Diseño sonoro: Gabriel Reyna, Pablo Betancourt
Compañías Productoras: Colectivo Colmena (Colectivo de Creadores Audiovisuales SAPI de CV)
Distribución y ventas internacionales: Antipode Sales International
Muestra: Locarno International Film Festival Cineasti del presente
En español
96 minutos

In All the Fires, first-time director Mauricio Calderón Rico rises to the challenge of making a sensitive coming of age film with LGBTQ+ interest and a personal style.

All the countries in the world have their coming of age films, dealing with that dark, conflicted and very cinematographic stage adolescents pass through on their way to adulthood. Alas, Hollywood style has permeated local ways, transforming teenagers into elven beings – with not a pimple in sight – who manage their conflicts (all solvable) with a minimum of yelling and a good dose of romance. All the Fires is the Mexican answer to this glamorized teenage universe.

Bruno (Sebastian Rojano), the protagonist, is a teenager who lives with his young widowed mother Inés (Ximena Ayala). He’s rather quiet and solitary, sometimes malicious, with a rather non-descript appearance. His adolescent rebellion is channeled into a fascination –which has not yet become a mania– for fire. He is seduced by flames: how to cause them, video them, share them on the Internet. But he is not interested in their effects, as an arsonist would be. He also feels pressured to define his gender identity in an environment in which LGBTQ+ is repudiated or at least silenced. The attempt of a kiss by his best friend Ian (Ari López) and the presence of Gerardo (Héctor Illanes), a man interested in his mother, trigger him to escape the city and go find Daniela (Natalia Quiroz), an admirer of his videos.

All the Fires is the first feature film by Mauricio Calderón Rico, author of five short films that have been widely screened at festivals. Calderón Rico shows sensitivity and temperance, avoiding to sweeten Bruno’s relationships, and he portrays them with enough space to keep them from being suffocating. Although the use of fire as a metaphor –of passion, of oblivion, of finishing something– is excessive, there are moments when it is mesmerizing. The scene with a man for whom Bruno lights a cigarette is notable: the timing indicates an offering and complicity at the same time.

By fleeing Mexico City, Bruno also escapes from the complexities of the male role in his own home and in his life.  In this new environment, male bonding is established with soccer, sweat, and beer, regardless of age. The film skillfully handles this irony and suggests that even permissive adults are simply compartmentalizing their prejudices.

The director, who prepared the film for about three years, probably decided to stay with the same leading actor he originally chose. Bruno’s behavior is understandable at 14 years old, but naive for a 16-year-old inhabitant of Mexico City. It’s amazing that he does not know the word “queer”, often spelled “cuir” in Spanish.  As usually happens with coming of age stories, Bruno is almost always on the screen. The director only allows himself the freedom to do a few scenes without him, with the result that they automatically feel like a conspiracy. This highly focused narrative makes it more plausible that we never see the despair Bruno’s mother must feel at his “escape”. In a country where 30,000 people have disappeared in the last three years – most of them teenagers – this kind of running away from home acquires alarming dimensions.

All the Fires may not be an out-of-control wildfire, but it is a promising flame about teens and LGBTQ+ issues. It is remarkable how cinematographer Miguel Escudero Torres handles fire, making it seem cozy, threatening or fun depending on the occasion. The film was produced with evident care, affection and a low budget by the independent collective Colmena, which presented the feature Mostro in Locarno in 2021.

Director, screenplay: Mauricio Calderón Rico
Cast: Sebástian Rojano, Ximena Ayala, Héctor Illanes, Ari López, Natalia Quiroz, Hannah Romen, Antonio Fortier, Iliana Donatlán.
Producers: Daniel Loustaunau, Francisco Sánchez, Araceli Velázquez
Cinematography: Miguel Escudero Torres
Editing: Marlén Ríos-Farjat
Music: Turista Universal, Santiago Mijares, Jorge Santos, Mónica Saldaña, Stefanía Kirnbauer, Héctor Vázquez
Direct Sound: Irina Guadarrama Olhovich
Sound design: Gabriel Reyna, Pablo Betancourt
Production companies: Colectivo Colmena (Colectivo de Creadores Audiovisuales SAPI de CV)
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Cineasti del presente)
In Spanish
96 minutes