Lithuania Triumphs in Locarno

Toxic is set in a bleak industrial town where thirteen-year-old newcomer Marija (Vesta Matulytė) is mocked at school for her limp until she meets Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaitė). Kristina may be as cruel as all the other teens in town, but she does offer at least a semblance of friendship. Marija follows her to a modeling school, “the squat gray premises of which belie their claims of sending successful graduates to catwalks in Paris and Tokyo,” as Guy Lodge puts it in Variety.

In Toxic, “the vague promise of an escape to pretty much anywhere is enough to motivate frightening extremes of disordered eating and body modification,” writes Lodge, who finds the film “sobering but not without glimmers of tenderness and humor.” Listing Harmony Korine, Sean Baker, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Athina Rachel Tsangari as filmmakers she admires, Bliuvaitė tells Georg Szalai in the Hollywood Reporter that she was “very lucky to get to work with an amazing cinematographer. He is this Lithuanian filmmaker, Vytautas Katkus, who is making his first feature film as a director now.”

It may not be long before someone programs the first series heralding the New Lithuanian Cinema. In Drowning Dry, Bareiša—whose first feature, Pilgrims, won the Orizzonti Award in Venice in 2021—directs Gelminė Glemžaitė and Agnė Kaktaitė as Ernesta and Juste, two sisters vacationing with their families at the lakeside country home where they grew up. Ernesta’s husband, Lukas (Paulius Markevičius), is a mixed-martial-arts champion and a risk-taking go-getter, but Juste’s husband, Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), earns a lot more.

That’s the source of some tension, but overall, with all the dining and dancing and the kids hopping in and out of the lake, all goes well. Until it doesn’t. “The tragedy strikes out of nowhere, during a one-take sequence that starts off casually, even playfully, only to transform in the blink of an eye,” writes Jordan Mintzer in the Hollywood Reporter. At the Film Stage, Rory O’Connor finds Drowning Dry to be “a singular work: conceptually rich in its design and ideas, beautifully shot in its own evasive way, even cruelly funny.”

Besides Bareiša’s cast, Kim Minhee, too, won a Best Performance award. In Hong Sangsoo’s thirty-second feature, By the Stream, Kim plays Jeonim, a lecturer at a women’s university in Seoul who asks the uncle she hasn’t seen in ten years—Seion (Kwon Haehyo), a retired actor who now runs a bookstore—to write and direct a short sketch for her students to perform. “Distinguished from other Hongs like it by its light autumnal chill and accompanying russet palette, this subtle comedy of actors, academics, and dreams set to one side welcomes the director’s steadfast fans like a gentle but hesitant embrace,” writes Guy Lodge.

Kurdwin Ayub’s Moon won the Special Jury Prize—second-best film in the International Competition, essentially—the Europa Cinemas Label, the Boccalino D’Oro Prize presented by independent film critics, and a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury. Like Ayub’s Sonne, the winner of the Best First Feature Award in Berlin in 2022, Moon was produced by Ulrich Seidl.

Choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger plays Sarah, a martial-arts fighter at the tail end of her career. On the lookout for work, she leaps at the chance to train three sisters of a wealthy Jordanian. In Amman, she shuttles between her luxury hotel and the home of these young women cut off from the world and interested in just about anything but learning how to fight.

Holzinger is “an excellent and credible casting choice as Sarah, whose brittle vulnerability hides behind no-nonsense, dry wit and tough physicality,” finds Carmen Gray at the Film Verdict. Moon unfolds as “a horror story of human rights abuse,” but for Gray, “the film plays up a little too much to reductive, fear-based, and exoticized stereotypes of the Arab world as home to treacherous enclaves of limitless wealth and unchecked patriarchal power, particularly when a potential white savior 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.”

Presided over by filmmaker Jessica Hausner (Little Joe, Club Zero), the jury awarded Special Mentions to Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times)—which also won the FIPRESCI Prize—and Mar Coll’s Salve Maria. Wang’s film is the second in a trilogy shot in the late 2010s in and around Chinese textile workshops where workers flirt, fight, and toil away at sewing machines in fifteen-hour shifts.

Youth (Spring) premiered in Cannes last year, and at RogerEbert.com, Robert Daniels finds that the new film “feels tighter, better conceived, with clearer ties and arcs that paint a better picture of a youthful generation trapped on the margins.” Wrapping up the trilogy, Youth (Homecoming) will premiere in Venice next month.

In Coll’s film, a new mother becomes obsessed with a news story about a French woman who has drowned her ten-month-old twins. For Mariana Hristova at Cineuropa, “the apt title, Salve Maria, emphasizes the character’s heroism and martyrdom, complemented by the mournful and exhausted expression of the actress in the title role, Laura Weissmahr, but it also conveys a subtle critique of the idealized image of motherhood in Catholicism.”

C. J. “Fiery” Obasi, Lina Soualem, and Charles Tesson, the jurors for the competitive program spotlighting first and second features this year, gave the award for Best Film to Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity, the story of two cousins selling neon crucifixes. “Georgia’s capital Tbilisi has become a veritable open-air thrift market in this scrappily episodic and freewheeling, dry-humored debut feature,” writes Carmen Gray. “This is a city in which Orthodox religious rituals persist as the traditional skeleton of daily life, but the energies of the down and out on the margins are diverted by the harsh business of survival, and every object is eyed as a potential money-spinner, for re-use or resale.”

Denise Fernandes won the Best Emerging Director award for Hanami. In Cape Verde, young Nana (Sanaya Andrade) falls ill and is sent to the foot of a volcano to heal. There, she sees a portal to another world. Hanami is “a film of two parts,” suggests Oris Aigbokhaevbolo at the Film Verdict. “Roughly. The first part establishes a poetic tone very much steeped in magic realism. The subsequent second part anchors the story on concrete ground.”

The Special Jury Prize went to Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s Listen to the Voices. Thirteen-year-old Melrick returns to French Guiana from France to spend the summer with his grandmother and to learn about his family history, which Aigbokhaevbolo points out is very similar to the director’s. “Maybe this is therapy but it does play well,” he writes in his review of this “deeply impressive first feature.”

The two Filmmakers of the Present awards for Best Performance went to Anna Mészöly, who plays a teacher bringing fresh ideas to a Hungarian school in Bálint Szimler’s Lesson Learned—which also scored a Special Mention, as did Iva Radivojević’s When the Phone Rang—and Callie Hernandez for playing Carrie, a fictionalized version of herself in Invention, which she cowrote with director Courtney Stephens.

Throughout this year’s festival, eleven estimable critics have been assigning ratings on a scale of one to five to dozens of films screening in several Locarno programs, including the competitions. As of this writing, no film on the Moirée critics grid has achieved a higher average score—3.7—than Invention.

Talking to Jordan Cronk at Filmmaker, Hernandez and Stephens recall how the project emerged from a conversation about the fathers both had recently lost. Both men dreamed big, and some of their ideas were pretty out there. Hernandez’s father was a medical doctor who became a local celebrity in New England as he appeared on talk shows and public access television touting his latest remedies—including a four-foot-tall vibrational healing machine.

Shot on Super 16 mm by Raphael Palacio Illingworth, Invention “furthers Stephens’s longstanding interest in cultural memory, female mythology, and the slippery notion of authorship,” writes Cronk. “As the film shifts between archival material and loosely scripted scenes of Carrie’s encounters with a variety of her father’s friends and former associates—including an estate lawyer played by filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins (directors Joe Swanberg and Caveh Zahedi also appear in small roles)—a slipstream of fictions and fantasies emerge from the fabric of multiple intersecting realities, a meta-cinematic conceit Stephens reinforces through use of on-set audio of the cast and crew recorded during production. With Invention, Stephens and Hernandez have fashioned a uniquely reflexive portrait of the grieving process, utilizing personal experience to articulate something universal about death and the ways we mourn the complicated figures in our lives.”