Your Ads Privacy ChoicesIMDb By 2025-04-29T06:45:00+01:00 Hong Kong star Jackie Chan is to be honoured with the Pardo Alla Carriera award at the 78th Locarno Film Festival (August 6-16) The award will recognise Chan’s career to date which spans more than 150 films over six decades as an actor He will receive the honour on August 9 on Locarno’s Piazza Grande Chan will also introduce 1983 action-comedy Project A and 1985 classic Police Story He will also take part in an on-stage conversation that is open to the public on August 10 After beginning as a child actor in the 1960s Chan found major success in 1978 with Snake In The Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master his blend of kung-fu comedy with audacious stunts was a reliable box-office draw for legendary Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest Chan was Asia’s highest grossing action star and he made his break into Hollywood with 1996 buddy comedy Rush Hour His work as a director ranges from Police Story and Armour Of God to 2012’s Chinese Zodiac He will next be seen in Karate Kid: Legends Sony’s next chapter in the martial arts franchise Nazzaro said: “Jackie Chan is both a key figure in contemporary Asian cinema and one whose influence has rewritten the rules of Hollywood cinema Chan has continually reinvented martial arts cinema and… has absorbed the lessons of Buster Keaton and early cinema as his own creating masterpieces that have captivated audiences around the world.” Bookmark this page to keep track of all the latest festival dates EXCLUSIVE: Eva Victor’s comedy drama world premiered at Sundance and will play at Cannes in Directors’ Fortnight Company’s latest foray into genre will open theatrically on October 10 Warner Bros’ A Minecraft Movie dominated the month with Gaumont’s Once Upon My Mother the top local film Golshifteh Farahani and Mélissa Boros star in Ducournau’s latest feature Screen International is the essential resource for the international film industry access to the Screen International archive and supplements including Stars of Tomorrow and World of Locations Site powered by Webvision Cloud You'll now receive updates based on what you follow Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors If you have done all of this and still can't find the email Esmé Holden Esmé Holden offers a heartfelt reflection on the highs and lows of her first time attending the Locarno Film Festival A few days after becoming homeless I was invited to the Locarno Film Festival glamorous reputation and I wasn’t even really sure where Locarno was (the south of Switzerland But when I was asked to be a member of the inaugural Letterboxd Grande Piazza jury judging the films playing on the large outdoor screen I took it as a sign that I made the right choice to move back to London and throw away the last remains of the life I had been building for the previous eighteen months But soon enough I found myself at Gatwick airport A week before I had to call up a friend and ask them to come sit with me while I belatedly booked my flights and freak out about every detail I hadn’t found a new job or a permanent place to live and I’d hardly watched any movies I wasn’t sure what I was doing going to a major film festival After a seamless flight and an almost relaxing journey from Milan into a landscape ever greener and more mountainous I didn’t have more than a few seconds to appreciate Locarno – except to note the picturesque Lake Maggiore that it points towards – before running onto a bus to get to the next town over but the buses less so; I hadn’t realised just how hot it was a fairly middling Treasure of the Sierra Madre rip-off I saw as part of the festival’s retrospective strand exploring the history of Columbia Pictures the desert was so hot that sweat evaporated off of the actors’ faces and had to be simulated with oil so I just sweat the regular way – and did so pretty much nonstop for the next 10 days except for when taking one of my thrice daily cold showers surrounded by high brick walls and bright yellow scaffolding you have to walk under people playing darts Fairy lights limply gesture towards a cosiness that’s impossible to feel on the mostly broken stools or outside of the small reach of the single working fan to start the festival off on the right foot All the press screenings were held in the bizarre Teatro Kursaal On a small screen above the entrance novelty orientalist imagery of dragons and seals and beautiful Chinese maidens flashed by A jury member from Nanjing had to look away It was a fitting setting to later watch Radu Jude’s Eight Postcards from Utopia a collage of Romanian adverts that comically – if a little redundantly over seventy minutes – reveal the carnal desires of their society; sex and pleasure and domination and and awful in the stupidest way possible (so it’s a Radu Jude film) there is no better example of this than the Campari Lounge a hideous open-air stain of novelty oversized Campari bottles and gaudy red everything else It sat behind the Piazza and at the end of a fake cut-out street where they sold festival branded Swatches after spending nearly fours hours in Wang Bing’s sharp and grounding Youth (Hard Times) the second in his trilogy of documentaries about Chinese garment workers especially during the endless scenes of pay negotiations I saw a DJ playing to a full lounge and an empty dance floor I tried to snap an (admittedly sneering) photo because of his total lack of other stimulation he noticed instantly and looked hauntingly down the lens of my phone camera I guiltily sauntered onto the late-night bus back to Ascona Money always hangs strangely over film festivals Whether in omnipresent sponsorships or in the fact that all the worst films I saw had either a Swiss production company or a suspiciously touristic Alpine setting Or in the casual conversations about travel and how many festivals you were going to this year which weren’t always easy to have as someone who often had to opt not to eat any of the city’s overpriced and mediocre food It’s something you can forget about briefly when the festival consumes the entire city and your every waking moment A feeling of unreality that is perfectly captured in Virgil Vernier’s 100,000,000,000,000 finds himself amongst a family of opulent wealth and the glistening Christmas lights of Monaco It shows a world that is not just empty but absent; the still-glowing light of an already extinguished star It cut sharply through the noise surrounding it It certainly didn’t feel appropriate to preface The Seed of the Sacred Fig an increasingly metaphorical (to its detriment in my opinion) drama about the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran featuring real footage of police brutality with a crowd camera projecting funny face filters than looked like an AI-generated Frozen Elsa onto an embarrassingly amused piazza audience who had to flee his home country after making this film was brought on stage by two of the most insufferably phoney showbiz hosts I have ever seen if not outright disgusted looks from the locals than I was used to back home which made me increasingly aware of how few trans people I saw anywhere I joked about being here because I was one of the only trans people in London who can work to a deadline (the irony of which will not be lost on my editor); I made a joke of my difference and people laughed where a trans throuple’s mere queer presence brings violent chaos to a gender reveal party I think every member of the jury felt dislocated then the jury itself’s place at the edge of the festival We were tangentially connected to the critic’s academy And there were technical problems with our badges specifically which were sometimes looked at by staff with incredulity and confusion It didn’t feel great to try and explain that we were on some jury they’d obviously never heard of far away from the different corners of the world and variably marginal positions we’d been pulled from and the movies got exponentially better (I think the last five movies I saw were the best five) it felt like something deeper than that they don’t compare to the sitting by the lake in the middle of the night sharing things it would usually take months to open up about because it was too hot to go up the step-ladder to the bunk beds That was what made it all start to make sense Even though many of our places in the industry remained uncertain we had found a little community on its edges It was like the standout scene of Hong Sang-soo’s By The Stream each share the kind of person they want to become all of a sudden bearing their dreams and their scars working on this play made space for a unique kind of intimacy All of us who were at that screening wept together On the day we chose Gaucho Gaucho – an elegiac documentary about another perhaps more meaningfully marginal community fighting for their fading way of life – as the winner of our award (a choice I think we were all pretty happy with) Gena Rowlands died and the moments of still-growing connection started to be tinged with sadness into their exhaustion or into the writing they needed to finish I went to the beach with the critic’s academy making new connections as if they had any space to grow and I tried to catch some of the hyped films I’d missed The festival had been so all-consuming (and so for all intents and purposes without end) Maybe it was because I didn’t know when I would be able to afford something like this again or maybe it was because I had said goodbye to so many things and so many people in these last few months and I wasn’t ready to do it again But after a tearful two-and-a-half-hour train ride to Milan airport I had to say goodbye to the final jury member as I always do seeing the world shrink so small below me A film festival is a dreamlike palace and I was starting to wake up the beauty – were starting to blur into a painful longing I guess writing this is a way to try and keep it sharp to remember the bad parts as much as the good to try and grab ahold of some elusive thing I paid £4.99 for in-flight Wi-Fi and logged onto Indeed LWLies 107: The Sinners issue – Out now! Ryan Coogler: ‘I’m more confident in my film language than I am in my English’ I’m Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today: The Video Shop at the End of the World The 2025 Cannes Film Festival line-up is here! The empty showboat of cinematic one-shots Inside the academic conference taking Terrifier back to school By Xuanlin Tham this bold independent film festival champions new ways of seeing with a 2024 focus on the work of Palestinian artist Noor Abed By Savina Petkova One of the world’s most important documentary festival delivers a host of very fine films as well as some flim-flammy political statements By Cici Peng Guest curator Cici Peng reflects on the remarkably programming on offer at the fifth edition, offering a mixture of screenings and immersive events that shift ideas of what a festival can be. Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies. By 2025-04-09T14:16:00+01:00 The Locarno Film Festival’s industry programme Locarno Pro is launching the Locarno Investment Community a new initiative that aims to connect independent film financiers with the European film industry will involve film financiers in industry events and networking opportunities and give them access to the Festival’s programme The programme has been designed in collaboration with Oxbelly a European nonprofit based in Greece that that holds a year-round initiative for US film investors and philanthropists interested in learning about and engaging in financing in the European co-production market The Locarno Investment Community will welcome both experienced funders and newcomers eager to support independent cinema Director of Locarno Pro said: “The initiative’s long-term vision is to attract a cohort of film funders from the U.S. ensuring sustained engagement and investment in independent filmmaking.” By 2025-04-15T16:34:00+01:00 Nazzaro will continue as artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival for another three years Nazzaro took over the role at the beginning of 2021 and has overseen four editions so far The festival said he will stay in post until its 80th anniversary edition in 2027 The news was confirmed following the festival’s annual General Assembly today (April 15) Nazarro said: “I would like to thank president Maja Hoffmann and the entire board of directors of the Locarno Film Festival for the trust and esteem placed in me and in the team that I have the privilege of leading To pursue together the work of these first five years in a moment full of unheard-of transformations in the audiovisual sector and film industry – at a complex historical moment – is an exciting challenge that will inspire us confidently towards our 80th anniversary.” The General Assembly also confirmed the festival’s finances for 2024 and projected budget for 2025 It said the 2024 edition of the festival grew its audience by 3.5% to 152,000 increased its funding from private partners and recorded a 20% increase in the sale of daily passes and a 15% increase in accreditation purchases The festival’s 2025 budget forecasts revenues of CHF 17.1m ($20.8m down from 2024’s revenues of CHF 18.2m ($22.2m the festival had a deficit of CHF 93,300 ($114,000 £86,000) against a current reserve of CHF 691,000 ($842,000 The festival said this marks an improvement compared to the deficit of CHF 485,000 ($591,000 Hoffman said: “The efforts of all board members and teams over the past year have enabled us to implement changes and achieve our goals more robust financial future for the festival These crucial steps strengthen the Festival’s position optimise our organisation and improve our ability to focus more on our main priorities of supporting the work of filmmakers and the film and cinema ecosystems.” The 78th Locarno Film Festival will take place from August 6-16 By 2025-03-17T11:42:00 MPV is hosting a works in progress showcase of 21 projects from Lithuania and the Baltic region SIGN IN if you have an account Access premium content Subscribe today If you have an account you can SIGN IN now By 2025-02-14T11:00:00 Six Canadian films in post-production will be showcased in collaboration with Telefilm Canada This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page By 2025-01-06T13:46:00 A-list festival says date change appears necessary “to respond to the challenges faced by the entire sector.” By 2025-03-10T15:17:00 Retrospective of over 40 films will focus on British cinema from 1945-1960 A Q&A session is also slated for August 10 He said Chan continually "reinvented martial arts cinema." there is a before Jackie Chan and an after Jackie Chan." By 2024-08-17T13:47:00 Kurdwin Ayub’s Moon won the special jury prize By 2024-08-07T16:03:00 40 features and four shorts made by Columbia between 1929 and 1959 that will be screening during the festival Festivals & Awards And while this dispatch is filled with three competition titles I’m glad I was ultimately able to include a smaller but no less imperative film too.   The sobering film features many of his hallmarks: dialogue-heavy scenes and a lens that strips his characters of the little artifice they entered the story with.  and her affection is just as quickly returned She remembers his acting days and compliments the stoutness he still possesses While the scenes between Sieon and Jeong are touching and giddy sketching an autumnal relationship between two people still hoping to feel butterflies the sequences featuring Sieon and Jeonim are distinctly different While Sieon seems quite content with himself shuffling through life with a soft chuckle appears to be ruminating about a potential crossroad in her life.  the film’s emotional heft isn’t found during the mounting of the play it often occurs around mid-afternoon meals as crisp leaves fall from slumbering trees—reservoirs of emotion stream outward revealing long-suppressed regrets and desires holding back Jeonim’s hurt and anger before once more removing herself from the world Similar to “By the Stream,” she remains distant and low-key to the point of being impossible to perceive That slipperiness doesn’t always work for “By the Stream,” but when it does it should be nourishing enough to be happily consumed by fans of the auteur.     While the Locarno competition featured an impressive array of seasoned directors it was Saulė Bliuvaitė‘s unsparing but heavy-handed feature directorial debut The Lithuanian urban coming-of-age film has a gritty story to tell of two girls: Marija (Vesta Matulytė) and Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaitė)—who begin as rivals before forming an unbreakable bond.  has recently arrived to live with her grandmother while her mother gets situated in a new city Marija’s limp and blankness make her an immediate target of bullying Kristina and her friends have swiped Marija’s jeans causing Marija to leap at Kristina in the girl’s lockerroom She is mostly viewed as a tomboy living with a father who routinely pays his daughter to go outside so he can knock boots with his girlfriend whereby Marija ventures to Kristina’s house for her jeans disrupting the dad’s foreplay with his lover The girls grow even closer through their shared modeling aspirations—both see the local agency as their ticket away from this dead-end town “Toxic” is a handsomely mounted picture that renders this nondescript town’s industrial surroundings with some manufactured beauty It’s also intent on showing all the ways these young girls are left vulnerable to predatorial boys harmful beauty standards that wreak havoc on their bodies and the hopelessness that pervades a town with seemingly no aspirational careers or adults to speak of The film is mostly an endless stream of exploitative acts hoisted upon Marija and Kristina that often sacrifices any attempt at exploring their inner lives their world only takes a surface interest in them.   in what ways does “Toxic” play any differently than any other poverty porn narrative about hard times in hard places weighing the portrayal of the bleakest nightmares over fully building out its characters While “Toxic” warns you what it’s about through its title you come to wish the resulting film was a little less obvious and a little less common.  Locarno’s other Lithuanian film veers closer to melodrama yet somehow feels more grounded than “Toxic.” Laurynas Bareisa’s “Drowning Dry” is another spin into the world of MMA detailing a trip taken by a hulking fighter named Lukas (Paulius Markevicius) with his wife Ernesta (Gelmine Glemzaite) and their young son to a lakeside house Accompanying them are Ernesta’s sister Juste (Agne Kaktaite) her husband Tomas (Giedrius Kiela) and their daughter There’s envy on both sides of the family: Despite his fighting success Lukas and Ernesta are too broke to buy a house—a reality that varies greatly from the well-off Juste and Tomas Tomas often feels emasculated around the sculpted Lukas challenging Lukas to a pitiful athletic duel and buying an oversized pick-up truck to bolster his self-confidence.  and the two families appear to genuinely care for each other Tomas playfully throws Ernesta’s niece in the lake only to see her disappear in the water—it pierces through the film’s breezy rhythm more elusive film by switching to non-linear storytelling Whether Ernesta’s niece survived is an open question And the lingering effects of another tragedy also arise in a later timeline Scenes from the past seemingly repeat themselves Ernesta and Juste dance to Donna Lewis’s’ “I Will Always Love You”; in another adds further textures to two broken families working to find some way forward beyond their shared paralysis It’s a fascinating bit of emotional excavation which could’ve played slightly more unyielding earlier in the film “Drowning Dry” is an absorbing and intensely conceived story that acutely dramatizes the difficulty of overcoming a sudden loss Guided by the voice of an off-screen narrator (Slavica Bajčeta) which premiered in the festival’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente competition begins in 1992 with a phone call at 10:36 am announcing to Lana (Natalija Ilinčić) the death of her grandfather the tragic call marks a permanent change in her life—it’s the beginning of the long war in Yugoslavia and seemingly months announce several other life-altering events while providing a fuller picture of Lana She becomes obsessed with a local glue-sniffing dropout named Vlada (Vasilije Zečević) finds solace and fun with her neighbor Jova (Anton Augustin) and learns family secrets involving her father and grandfather.  Radivojević has a commanding vision for this story Cinematographer Martin DiCicco bolsters Radivojević’s storytelling through his plaintive use of 16mm photography which adds a dreamlike quality to the nightmarish reality Apart from the film’s controlled visual and aural form “When the Phone Rang” lacks a sense of time the blowing out of a child’s memory reveals much through its seeming randomness The phone that seems to ring at the exact time every Friday is the invasion into her life that seems to have happened without reason.  Ilinčić as Lana is uncommonly assured throughout the picture and worry through the subtlest of expressions While the 72-minute runtime is perfectly charted you get the sense that this could’ve been three hours long and there still wouldn’t have been a wasted second That is the sure-handedness by Lana and the adeptness of Radivojević “When the Phone Rang” is the kind of small smartly crafted film that feels revelatory and life-changing without ever devolving into platitudes.   Robert Daniels is Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto to the Berlinale and Locarno and is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association By 2024-11-28T08:30:00 Locarno’s co-production and talent development initiative is to focus on the African continent for its next cycle In her 2018 book, The Monarchy of Fear, American philosopher Martha Nussbaum rings an alarm bell over the devastating impact of trepidation on democracy She stressed that the terrorising mechanisms used by people in power to realise their political visions stand in contrast to the free and healthy essence so-called democratic societies believe they possess.  Fear is not only endemic to policy-making, but to all facets of contemporary life, including art.  Since 7 October, art organisations the world over have been scrambling to deal with the Gaza question a question that has proven more polarising in the West than any major issue in recent memory They insist festivals should stand as democratic platforms for all points of views even as Russian films and Syrian Assad government-backed productions continue to be blocked from the international film scene.  Fear has been the underlying current of the fair’s public dealing with Gaza, because the fact is, all major festivals have unofficially turned their backs on any potential Zionist-sympathetic pictures including Venice which has been inaccurately accused of showing “complicit” Israeli films.  None of the world’s most prominent film festivals called for a ceasefire you’d be hard-pressed to find any festival heads or programmers in alignment with Israel’s actions.  Fear has thwarted curators from openly speaking out about the conflict or condemning Israel for its “crimes against humanity” as Spanish Oscar-winner Javier Bardem put it this week in San Sebastian.  festivals have chosen to offer Middle Eastern film selections that dance around the topic indirectly carrying their pro-Palestinian sentiment without making an overt statements while also allowing space for artists to express their solidarity with the Palestinian cause One of the world’s premier showcases for conceptually daring cinema and the 2024 edition contained a large Middle Eastern selection that touched upon contentious subjects.  From the aftermath of Gaza and the brutal patriarchy in conservative Arab societies to the lingering shadow of Tunisia’s bloody past and the ever-present legacy of Lebanon’s Civil War Locarno offered a portal into the mindset of Arab filmmakers struggling to find their place in a marketplace that has grown curious yet cautious about their stories.  Headlining the selection was Mond (Moon) the highly anticipated sophomore feature of Iraqi-Austrian filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub who made a splash on the festival scene with her 2022 debut about a veiled Kurdish teenager in Vienna who is transformed overnight into a mini-celebrity after her rendition of Losing My Religion goes viral While her debut provided a rare portal into the complex lives of young Arab-Austrian teenagers her second feature explores the uneasy relationship between middle-class Europeans and an Arab culture they cannot fathom.  Florentina Holzinger is Sarah, a martial artist who lands a lucrative job offer to train the daughters of a wealthy family in Jordan Utterly clueless about the region and ignorant of the history of the shady family Sarah finds herself in a strange land training a group of spoilt and heavily surveilled girls who have little interest in both the sport and Sarah herself.  What begins as a drama of awkward culture clash swiftly morphs into a dark thriller when the girls are revealed to be quasi-prisoners in a luxury house operated by a shifty smooth-talking older brother and controlled by permanently absent parents.  Ayub shrewdly highlights the economic malaise that has stricken the young disaffected members of the middle-class and driven them to seek better-paid work opportunities in socially and politically conservative places - not just in the Gulf but practically everywhere The choice of Jordan is not intentional: the wealthy family could be in Cairo The subtext of the broken global economy is far more illuminating than whatever Ayub is seeking to explore about the Arab world which essentially comes off as a rudimentary characterless backdrop to the main drama.  The occasional thrills offered by the genre tropes cannot conceal the predictability of the material at hand Mond is yet another account of young bright girls oppressed by their controlling family for reasons that never manage to convince.  The revelation that the family is part of the Jordanian mafia adds more loose ends to the anaemic narrative of the film.  There’s undeniably excellent craftsmanship on display such as the contrast between moody nocturnal scenes at the local bar and the invasive brightness of the girls’ contained environment but Mond ultimately comes off as a confused project It initially tries to reverse the colonial relationship between Europe and the Arab world but ends up saying little or nothing about the various pointers it shallowly treats.  More ambitious and far more elusive was Agora, the latest unclassifiable creation by Tunisia’s enfant terrible His third feature is an investigative mystery of sorts centred on a small town suddenly rocked by the return of three disappeared persons who have been reincarnated in semi-human form: half alive A high-ranking intelligence agent from the capital is deployed to assist the hapless local authorities in unravelling the riddle of the revenants.  Agora is ingeniously anchored from the point of view of a motionless black crow and a blue dog; their dialogue is transposed in ominous subtitles that act as a harbinger of doom.  The village gets hit with more freakish happenings that may or may not be linked with the revenants.  While the cause of these occurrences is never fully revealed the connection of the returned ones with the equally cryptic intelligence officer suggest that the former may have been victims of a violence that was never punished; violence the apathetic village may have been complicit in.  His films are notable for their defiance of narrative conventions and logic oscillating between David Lynch and Spanish surrealist master Luis Bunuel and creating ample space for different interpretations Agora does not scale the heights of his debut as the promised descent to sheer madness never arrives.  The political subtext of the picture – Tunisia’s incapacity in dealing with its violent past and the enduring memory of the persecuted victims –  is more pronounced than Slim’s previous outings anticlimactic third act does ultimately harm the picture.  More direct in its political intentions and more straightforward in its formal approach was Green Line Sylvie Ballyot’s exhaustive reconstruction of the Lebanese Civil War as witnessed by the film’s protagonist and co-writer Bizri was a little child when she was held at gunpoint by a militant at the peak of the war in the 1980s a memory that has haunted her for most of her life.  she returns to Beirut to embark on a quixotic endeavour to understand what had happened during the bloodiest decade of Lebanon’s history.  Bizri interviews the different parties of the war: the Christian Kataeb Party the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in Lebanon Bizri uses a miniature of Beirut circa the 1980s to play out the battles that waged at the time as each of her interviewees reflect on their actions during the war Some strive to absolve their actions and deny any wrongdoings others come clean and confess the murders they had instinctively carried out.  the re-enactments of the murders by Bizri’s subjects and the extensive analysis of the politics behind the war does not bring the viewer to a closer understanding of a conflict that remains largely unfathomable.  The fight for true Lebanese identity – whatever that may be – is the underlying charge behind the ideologies of these quarrelling factions albeit in altered forms; that their creeds are now being adopted by younger generations grappling with similar identity conflicts.  is the sole lifeline they can hang on to cope with the trauma of the past Bizri counters the argument by emphasising that the corporeal violence that has been passed from one generation to another cannot be exorcised through collective amnesia.  The question of Palestine looms large over the proceeding the ex-member  of the Communist Party attests that they believed back then that their actions will solve the Palestinian issue once and for all he realised that the Palestinian dilemma might not be resolved in his lifetime is partially informed by the opposing perspectives on how to deal with Palestine The lurking lust for bloodshed the Civil War unearthed is what Ballyot or the half-dozen interviewees do not manage to thoroughly elucidate.  said that “Hezbollah has hijacked Lebanon and that’s why it’s a failed state.”  Green Line – which earned the Mubi prize for best debut feature – proves that the Lebanese malaise runs deeper than its connection with Hezbollah.  Watching the film now in light of the current Israeli attack can be a sobering experience: a reminder of the familiar self-inflicted damage Lebanon has continuously struggled with and the unhealed trauma amplified by Israel's aggression.  The spectre of Israeli malevolence hovers over Maha Haj’s short Upshot the first Palestinian film conceived and shot in the wake of 7 October.  Personal Affairs (2016) and Mediterranean Fever (2022) dealt with the sense of resignation and stifling stillness governing the lives of Palestinians residing in historic Palestine iconic star and director Mohammad Bakri and Areen Omari are an elderly married couple inhabiting a remote cottage in an unidentified Palestinian village.  They spend their days incessantly talking about their five adult children: their successes The tranquillity the couple enjoy is broken when a journalist pays them a visit He is conducting a report on the aftermath of 7 October and the families that have lost their loved ones to the Israeli military campaign What unfolds next is a predictable turn of events that does not come at the expense of emotional power.  is a snapshot of grief; of the coping mechanisms victims of the war employ to carry on.  Upshot – easily the best Arab short film of the year – proves that political intentionality is inseparable from great cinema relegating human loss into indistinguishable figures Haj puts human faces to the tragedy of Gaza weaving a simple yet remarkably sensitive anecdote laced with the same sense of resignation borrowed from her previous films.  acceptance of the individual’s unchanged status enforced by the Israeli occupier is fundamental to the contemporary Palestinian experience Haj’s project can be partially viewed as an endeavour to counter the undignified behaviour of the Israeli occupier: an attempt to remind the world of the colossal angst every family in Gaza is invisibly The contrast between the serene natural surrounding and the simmering internal loss augments the film’s intense emotional wallop resulting in a work brimming with graceful mourning Copyright © 2014 - 2025. Middle East Eye Only England and Wales jurisdiction apply in all legal matters Middle East Eye          ISSN 2634-2456                      Click here to read our spring 2025 issue, featuring Caught by the Tides' Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao, our annual spotlight on locations and more... The biggest headline of the 77th Locarno Film Festival wasn’t a movie but a man: Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan who attended to receive a career achievement award as a reminder (none is needed) of the role red carpet celebrity plays in drawing money and attention to festivals which can then But even as the whole idea of “cinema” requires increasingly vigilant caretaking those festivals themselves are nearly all in financial trouble When I got this job at Filmmaker a decade ago companies who’d invested a lot of time and money in VR were sweatily trying to make it a thing and the phrase “the intersection of storytelling and technology” (one which could have applied just as well to movies or TV at their inception but let that pass) was getting tossed around a lot and now we’re being inundated with relentless advertising for AI but in Christoph Hochhäusler’s Death Will Come it’s still time to dunk on wearing helmets and how stupid they look Crime lord Charles Mahr (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is introduced at a meeting with rivals who want to be potential collaborators They propose that he invest in a forthcoming VR Erotic Center whose clients will strap on the headgear and copulate with latex dolls; Mahr puts on a helmet sticks his fingers down a prototype’s mute mouth and walks away unimpressed by this potential rival for flesh-and-blood sex workers The stage is set for a traditional crime movie showdown between an older warlord who holds on to traditional values in a world that’s rapidly changing for the worse and younger The self-consciousness of the genre exercise is in keeping with the neonoir-adjacent work of Hochhäusler’s Berlin School compatriots like Christian Petzold (in films like Jerichow) and Thomas Arslan (In the Shadows); likewise this is as engaged with making explicit the subtexts and mechanisms of its narrative conventions as actually executing them this means not just the VR angle but Luxembourg’s increasing prominence as an international co-financier foregrounded in an opening sequence taking place there (although the film mostly unfolds in the more dismal portions of Brussels) This is all theoretically just right for Locarno whose well-intended if slightly cringey slogan this year was “Cinema Forever.” (Though it’s worth noting the festival also had a small showcase presumably in return for decent sponsorship funds Ben Rivers’s Bogancloch is his second feature and third collaboration with UK hermit Jake Williams Rivers first filmed him for 2006’s uptempo short This is My Land where the massively bearded and somewhat ferocious-looking Williams spoke in an incongruously reedy the pace went down; now silent and projecting weathered stoicism Williams’s daily routine was captured in lustrous idiosyncratically pockmarked black-and-white 16mm If Two Years at Sea was the visual equivalent of a drone album its signature shot a massive durational study of the ripples produced from tossing a stone into the lake from start to extremely long finish Bogancloch is more MOR in offering up a near-classical visual grammar this isn’t surprising; the prolific Rivers has tried a variety of modes in his solo work not all of which I’d be able to blind ID as the output of the same person and sometimes merges his voice indissolubly with that of co-directors like Ben Russell (A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness) and Anocha Suwichakornpong (Krabi 2562) New choices here include having Williams speak more than ever and shorter shots breaking down his daily routine; I could have wished for much longer gazes at e.g which is cut away from almost immediately to show the rest of what Williams is doing that afternoon Boganloch climaxes with a drone shot going up up and away from Williams submerged in a tub outdoors; I pictured the 16mm camera perilously swaying in the breeze but the film’s overall effect is less spectacular than its predecessor’s warping throughout shots of often startling beauty like one of a forest where the grain swimming between trees radiates different densities The overall effect is a little uncanny; both identifiably “filmic” and digitally pinned down; it’s a celluloid-based work that’s almost impossible to imagine seeing projected on celluloid but which really does look finished in this both-and-neither form Rivers intends to keep revisiting Williams every decade or so; more silence next time The third feature by Switzerland’s admirably idiosyncratic Ramon and Silvan Zürcher, The Sparrow in the Chimney is a frustrating synthesis of their previous two films. Collaborators whose precise roles change from project to project, the twins are developing their own separate voices and intend to direct solo; this time As in 2013’s excellent The Strange Little Cat what should be a low-key family gathering generates increasing bad mojo in a confined space; as in their less excellent follow-up that tension eventually leaps out of exactingly framed unorthodoxly structured naturalism into an overtly hallucinatory register Sparrow begins by once again demonstrating the brothers’ John-Carpenter-level facility with weaponizing off-screen space leaning into meticulously locked-off interiors that are repeatedly unexpectedly disrupted often by animals; a cat jumping over the windowsill disappearing and then re-entering from the left foreground proliferate on a scale even greater than the first two films surrounding a family in the countryside in which pretty much everyone seems to have some kind of mental illness That’s especially true of mother Karen (Maren Eggers) whose hostility towards all around her poisons the communal well The mothers of the Zürchers’ filmography trend monstrous; here that manifests with a degree of hostility even Noah Baumbach might find excessive as in an exchange between Karen and her furiously estranged daughter Johanna (Lea Zoe Voss) after she overhears a typically fractious interaction between the mom and her husband: “Why don’t you get divorced?” “To make your life hell.” Part of what I liked most about Strange Little Cat was the ways it generated surprise from both its framing and unexpected structure low on overt incident but subtly discombobulating; that the Zürchers’ subsequent films have leaned into greater degrees of melodramatic hyperbole isn’t where I want them to go That premiere was packed, with nearly every seat in the 2,800-capacity Palexpo taken—presumably Swiss national pride1 at work as another premiere screening I attended there brought out a creditable but less overwhelming audience This was the most traditionally “Locarno-esque” work I saw during my six days there—i.e a very specific sub-species of “challenging festival film” heavily influenced by Pedro Costa A brief prologue of sorts shows grape-pickers at work while a managerial shithead yells at them to go faster; this abusive quasi-motivation constitutes the sole form of labor he’s performing management sics an ox on them; they all shin up trees and stay there for roughly half of the 72-minute production While one worker (Soraia Prudêncio) initially appears to be the focus Mateus puts dozens upon dozens of non-performers through their declamatory paces highlighting face after face for one or two lines only almost uninflected approach to dialogue centered around revolutionary concerns (bread land etc.) is the Straub/Huillet component while the daytime shots of each—mildly sweaty profiles from just below—call to mind the Eisenstein of Que Viva Mexico The images become more familiarly Costa-esque in their chiarascuros as sunlight fades to night suggesting something like his take on The Jungle Book as the ox roams below adding a pleasing touch of randomness to a largely programatic endeavor the general chronological trajectory and idea is clear beginning in the present and moving backwards in time through various historical iterations of oppression and rebellion explicitly invoking Salazar’s 20th-century dictatorship before costumes walk the film back to a 19th century conclusion If Fire is familiar in both its austerity and quasi-revolutionary solidarity (always an odd idea when the initial audience is overwhelmingly well-heeled Swiss people Mateus’s command of her craft (she co-DP’d and co-edited) is clear and her service in maintaining a particular lineage of severity admirable After last year’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World Radu Jude returned with a double feature of new work shown in one solid 133-minute lump—in part because neither is substantial enough to merit stand-alone showcasing co-directed with philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz which supercuts hundreds of Romanian TV advertisements from the post-Ceaușescu years into 72 minutes structured as eight chapters and an epilogue I would have preferred to watch the inevitably oft-campy adverts play out in full but understand the desire to pointedly juxtapose them a plainly discernible form of artistic intervention that hopefully prevents the results from registering merely as a Drafthouse pre-show kitsch assembly one being that the juxtapositions aren’t particularly interesting either formally or politically—aside from the seventh chapter “The Anatomy of Consumption,” which almost entirely removes sound from the equation to better foreground strung-together sequences of covetous gazes and lustful smiles at products the sexualized semiotic building blocks of advertising-as-desire brought into clear relief; everything else is a pellmell assemblage of general yuks loosely organized by clearly stated thematic preoccupations (like chapter eight “Masculin Feminin,” per Jude’s lodestar Godard) that points to the other problem: unless you were expecting Jude/Ferencz-Flatz to take a bold stance in favor of conspicuous consumption and a fully materialist society there are no surprises in the thematic drift which is as blunt as the title; there’s nothing to do but note the obvious about unsophisticated Jude likes to talk about embracing imperfection; still I think it wouldn’t hurt if he were to try for perfection secure as he would be in the knowledge that since the immaculate is beyond human capability director Juri Rechinsky thanked the 11:00 AM audience for being inside instead of swimming in the lake before noting that it was the 899th day of the Ukrainian invasion The Turkmenistan-born/Ukrainian-raised/Austria-based filmmaker’s first feature occasionally mildly stylized portrait of Ukrainian drug addicts doing their thing in derelict basements with a tour-de-force standout sequence when one returns home to look for his mom and wanders a snowy village where her former partners (one very drunk) denounces her on the street; suffice to say Rechinsky is comfortable with abjection I’m not really sure what to say of his contribution to the Ukrainian empathy-raising-genre other than to note that it’s likewise exceedingly grim even by the standards of what’s unfortunately become a mini-genre Dear Beautiful proceeds along two primary tracks the first being the transport of soldier’s corpses from their pickup and loading into body bags onto the field to their final funereal destination; an older man (nickname: “Bulldozer”) and younger volunteer transport 17 dead whose weight makes the back of their vehicle sag perilously as they pull out The other narrative strand follows the transport of extremely unhealthy elderly people from their homes to way-station nursing homes to other way-station nursing homes given the variety of their ailments (all terrible) pervasive deafness and a collective senility that requires their caretakers to repeatedly yell basic information it’s not like this section would be any lighter if it originated during peacetime I’ll say this for Rechinsky: unlike a lot of nonfiction filmmakers who systematically dilute grim material with systematic doses of “warm interactions” or other such leavening moments but I was left as confused as the director seemed to be about what watching the film might achieve for anyone artistically or politically Now through the grumbling portion of the dispatch, it’s time to finish cheerily with my two favorite new films2 from this year’s Locarno. Though the sole credited director of Invention Courtney Stephens shares the opening “A Film By” credit with lead performer Callie Hernandez who won Best Actress for playing “Carrie,” a riff on herself Hernandez’s dad was an alternative medicine physician of sorts; his death and the subsequent estate-dissolving fallout are the starting prompt for a story that’s often unexpectedly close to comedy It’s a not very funny situation—the sudden death of a father whose legally dubious actions on multiple fronts have left a huge mess for his overwhelmed daughter to clean up—but the opening scene establishes a light touch and fine eye for American eccentricity (division of rural grotesquerie) as a funeral home employee clicks through chintzy automated organ tracks before landing on what (somehow and with no audible degree of difference from its fellows) is the right one for this occasion The homeopathic realm can often slide into the conspiratorial (why was Dr so it’s not necessarily surprising when one of the late physician’s grateful ex-patients but he did leave behind a very confused estate including the wonky magnetic-ray-healing (?) titular invention whose patent rights Carrie can either inherit or not A withdrawn Hernandez hits the investigative trail inciting droll encounters with people who knew her father acting as an in-mourning straight woman to their eccentric comic babbling Those conversations include three with an estate trustee possessing a strangely indexical expertise in patent law Kienitz Wilkins at the rapid-fire speed of his short films’ comic monologues Hernandez’s collection of TV appearances and video tapings took me straight back to the 90s when the physician lists the ten most purchased items at American grocery stores My best of fest was Virgil Vernier’s 100,000,000,000,000 (its onscreen title spelled out in the festival program as Cent milliard milliard) took place in and around the titular tech park and nearby towns like Antibes 100,000,000,000,000 leaps to the other side of the French Riviera to capture the inherently tremendous oddity of Christmas in Monaco The lightly plotted film has sex worker Afine (Zaharia Bouti) spending his holidays alone; while his housemates go off to Dubai he services clientele who haven’t left the city hanging out between assignations with Serbian babysitter Vesna (Mina Gajovic) and her pre-teen charge Julia (Victoire Kong) Vernier trains a sharp eye on the trickle-down social economy of those who service the ultra-wealthy and the very precisely graded power gaps between each: the drivers who ferry Afine and his friends are a cut below the clothing store employee who stands in awkward silence with Afine as their mutual client tries on a new dress subtly conveys discomfort with his obvious form of employment whose lack of high-profile funders is attested to by the fact the film begins immediately with its first shot rather than a parade of logos.) As in Antipolis Vernier draws outstandingly lived-in work from performers are encouraged to give performances that retain their natural presences and mannerisms while enacting lives that are very different from their own may explain 100,000,000,000,000’s lightly uncanny affect; it’s a naturalist drama that’s tonally somehow floating serenely above itself By 2024-08-06T09:14:00