Locarno 2024: The Verdict
The 2024 Locarno Film Festival spotlighted the future in more ways than one.
Locarno 2024
Locarno 2024: The Awards
‘Toxic’ (‘Akiplesa’), the first feature directed by Lithuania’s Saulé Bliuvaité, swept two top awards at the 77th Locarno Film Festival.
The Life Apart
Marco Tullio Giordana deals solidly with family drama and music in Locarno premiere ‘The Life Apart’.
Timestalker
Alice Lowe returns behind the camera with her second feature ‘Timestalker’, a century-spanning rom-com screened in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.
Eight Postcards from Utopia
Radu Jude teases the profound out of the profane with a manic, comical collage of material drawn from TV commercials produced in Romania after the collapse of its Communist regime in 1989.
looking she said I forget
A young woman acclimatises to the rhythms of a new city while reflecting on those of her lifestyle in looking she said I forget, the heady short from Naomi Pacifique.
New Dawn Fades
A sensitive mind struggles with esoteric encounters in the Istanbul gloom in Gurcan Keltek’s spectacularly atmospheric horror.
Listen to the Voices
In the impressive ‘Listen to the Voices’, Maxime Jean-Baptiste presents a sobering look at trauma, blackness, and violence in a Guianese neighbourhood.
Ben Burtt on the Magic of Sound Effects
TFV speaks to Oscar winner Ben Burtt, the 2024 recipient of the Vision Award at the Locarno Film Festival.
Cine Verdict: México 86
México 86 es el sobrio y sincero segundo largometraje del ganador de la Camera D´Or 2019 César Díaz. al que le falta pasión para ser un relato político convincente.
Transamazonia
Acts of faith, plunder and resistance deep in the Amazon are the territory of a majestic and hallucinatory but heavy-handed anti-colonial thriller from Pia Marais.
Weightless
Sara Fgaier’s feature debut is an account of love and loss that retains a poetic fragmentary appeal, while concealing a more powerful tale.
Holy Electricity
Tato Kotetishvili’s Georgian debut is a scrappily episodic and freewheeling, dry-humoured celebration of down-and-out margins brimming with eccentric personality.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Kevin Jerome Everson’s latest short – Practice, Practice, Practice – is yet another perfectly calibrated examination of the aspects of African-American labour that packs a powerful punch.
Drowning Dry
A family derailed by a swimming accident struggles to make sense of the trauma in Laurynas Bareisa’s haunting and profoundly disorienting drama.
The Sparrow in the Chimney
Ramon Zürcher’s utterly distinctive talent for twisting the domestic into the uncanny gains intensity in a cutting psychological horror as thrilling as it is elliptical and dark.
Bogancloch
Ben Rivers revisits hermit Jake Williams in Scottish woodland for a sparse, mysterious and music-oriented doc on life off the grid in gathering crisis.
Mothers don’t
Mar Coll returns to the Locarno Festival to explore the limits of modern motherhood in Mothers Don’t (Salve María), an intimate and empathetic film.
Death Will Come
Christoph Hochhäusler’s Brussels-set neo-noir about a female assassin sets up wild ideas about futuristic crime which a convoluted plot never quite delivers.
Cine Verdict: Salve María
La directora catalana Mar Coll explora los límites de la maternidad moderna en Salve María, largometraje íntimo y empático con el que vuelve al Festival de Locarno
A Flower of Mine
Italian author Paolo Cognetti returns to his filmmaking roots with ‘A Flower of Mine’, an ode to nature bowing in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.
Claude Barras: Art in (Stop) Motion
The Locarno Film Festival pays tribute to Claude Barras, a major name in contemporary Swiss animation.