Locarno Highlights
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Riz Ahmed is one of around 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that went on strike a couple of weeks ago, so he will not be traveling to Locarno to accept his Davide Campari Excellence Award. The festival still plans to present the world premiere of Yann Mounir Demange’s Dammi, starring Ahmed as a man who returns to Paris in search of his past, but as Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro tells Deadline’s Zac Ntim, “that does not undermine our support for the people that are striking for fair pay, share of profits, protection of intellectual creation, and to make sure the industry remains driven by human beings, not algorithms.”
Dammi will screen on Wednesday night for an audience of eight thousand on the Piazza Grande just before Locarno’s seventy-sixth edition officially opens with Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel’s The Falling Star, which Nazzaro calls a “sweet, melancholic story” that “floats somewhere in a universe where Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati meet.” Through August 12, when this year’s Locarno wraps, the Piazza Grande program will feature open-air screenings of more premieres; highlights of the year so far, such as Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Ken Loach’s The Old Oak; and two new restorations, Daniel Schmid’s La Paloma (1974) and Federico Fellini’s City of Women (1980).
Seventeen features are lined up in the main competition, including Critical Zone, a fictionalized, GPS-guided tour of Tehran’s underworld. Director Ali Ahmadzadeh has been under extreme pressure from Iranian authorities to pull the film, but both he and Locarno are standing firm. “Making this film was a big rebellion,” writes Ahmadzadeh in his director’s note. “Showing it means an even bigger victory for us.”
Nazzaro calls Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much of the End of the World “perhaps the most relevant film on how communication, media, and language have shaped images of labor.” In Lav Diaz’s Essential Truths of the Lake, Filipino police lieutenant Hermes Papauran (John Lloyd Cruz), introduced in last year’s When the Waves Are Gone, reopens a fifteen-year-old investigation into a woman’s disappearance. “Rape, molestation, this whole macho culture,” says Diaz in his conversation with Marta Bałaga in Variety, are “everywhere, and I have seen it since I was a child, and yet it’s not being addressed.”
The only American film in competition is Bob Byington’s Lousy Carter, starring David Krumholtz, fresh off his turn as Isidor Isaac Rabi in Oppenheimer, as an English professor who has lost the confidence of his best friend, his ex, and even his mom. “When the pandemic hit and it was clear it was here for a while,” Byington tells the Austin Chronicle’s Richard Whittaker, “the script was sort of a response—death draws nearer.”
Family Portrait, the debut feature from Lucy Kerr, is one of fourteen films lined up in the Cineasti del presente competitive program of first and second features. Deragh Campbell stars as Katy, who returns to Texas for her family’s traditional reunion, during which they pose for the photo for each year’s Christmas card. “Halfway through,” wrote Vadim Rizov when Kerr was named one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film last year, “when the mother disappears, Katy goes to look for her and enters the forest across the way in a bifurcation inspired by Tropical Malady.”
Another young woman heading home is seventeen-year-old Manon (Flavie Delangle), who returns to the northeastern French city of Belfort to seek out her estranged father—and to become a professional hockey player—in Hugues Hariche’s first feature, Rivière. “There’s something a bit vintage about the film, the way it addresses the kids, the way I present it,” Hariche tells Holly Jones in Variety. “What I love about that age is that everything’s over the top. Whatever you do, it’s bigger.”
This year’s retrospective, Spectacle Every Day: The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema, will be a deep dive into the productions that thrilled audiences in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Special events include conversations with Harmony Korine, István Szabó, and Tsai Ming-liang, whose new installation, Moving Portraits, will be on view at the underground Rivellino gallery from Saturday through August 12.
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