by Jay Weissberg and Boyd Van Hoeij
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.
