The Feast of the Leopard: Locarno Celebrates 70th Anniversary
The Locarno Film Festival, the outpost of new, progressive and daring cinema, will open its gates soon and the festival will open them to its new house, Palazzo del Cinema and GranRex Locarno. The refurbishing of Palazzo del Cinema was finished just in time to celebrate the festival's 70th anniversary.
The lineup of the upcoming edition is brimming with world premieres, starting with Romanian black comedy Charleston, a first fiction feature outing by Andrei Cretulescu, in a story where a recent grieving widower is asked for help overcoming the sorrow by his wife's lover .
The international competition will also further introduce a noir thriller by F.J. Ossang, 9 Doigts; a Brazilian effort, As Boas Maneiras (Good Manners), co-directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, described as a light genre effort featuring an unborn child ripping out of its mother's womb to be raised by a hired nanny; and Jan Speckenbach's drama Freedom, following a couple splitting up as the wife pursues freedom.
The competiion includes Swiss debuting director Dominik Locher's Goliath, a story about a young couple in which a man starts using steroids and then attacks his pregnant girlfriend; Isabelle Huppert and Romain Duris-led newest, loose, female-centred adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Serge Bozon, Madame Hyde; and one cinephile gem, finished after almost 30 years and after the original director's death, in which a group of Chilean filmmakers reconstructed La Telenovela Errant by the great Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz.
The "Filmmakers of the Present" competition will welcome Eliza Hittman's sophomore feature Beach Rats; Andrea Magnani's black comedy Easy, the nickname of the protagonist for whom nothing is easy even when he is supposed to transport a coffin with body from Italy to Ukraine; Shevaun Mizrahi´s “existential exploration of the cyclical nature of time and humanity´s search for meaning both in struggles of youth and in the recollections of old age,” titled Distant Constellation; and Ana Urushadze´s feature debut Scary Mother, following a middle-aged housewife who finally achieved her dream of publishing a book and realizes her fears of negative reception were not that ungrounded.
Naturally, there are many more cinephilic treats in store. Radu Jude will return to the Swiss gathering, bringing his latest project after the spectacular Scarred Hearts, The Dead Nation, a docu-essay on the rise of anti-Semitism and a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust,; Dane Komljen, the co-director of mesmerizing docufiction All the Cities of the North, will introduce “a film in two movements linked together by a story about men being turned into foxes,” titled Fantasy Sentences; and venerable European auteur Jean-Marie Straub will be feted with Leopard of Honor in a special ceremony accompanied by screenings of his works.
The Locarno Film Festival will run from August 2-12
International competition
9 Doigts By F.J. Ossang
As Boas Maneiras By Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra
Charleston By Andreï Cretulescu
Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? By Travis Wilkerson
En El Séptimo Día by Jim Mackay
Freiheit By Jan Speckenbach
Gemini By Aaron Katz
Gli Asteroidi By Germano Maccioni
Goliath By Dominik Locher
Good Luck By Ben Russell
La Telenovela Errante By Raúl Ruiz, Valéria Sarmiento
Lucky By John Carroll Lynch
Madame Hyde By Serge Bozon
Mrs. Fang By Wang Bing
Qing Ting Zhi Yan (Dragonfly Eyes) By Xu Bing
Ta Peau Si Lisse By Denis Côté
Vinterbrødre (Winter Brothers) By Hlynur Pálmason
Wajib (Duty) By Annemarie Jacir
Filmmakers of the Present Competition
3/4 By Ilian Metev Abschied
Von Den Eltern By Astrid Johanna Ofner
Beach Rats By Eliza Hittman
Cho-Haeng (The First Lap) By Kim Dae-Hwan
Dene Wos Guet Geit By Cyril Schäublin
Distant Constellation By Shevaun Mizrahi
Easy By Andrea Magnani
Edaha No Koto (Sweating The Small Stuff) By Ninomiya Ryutaro
Il Monte Delle Formiche By Riccardo Palladino
Le Fort Des Fous By Narimane Mari
Meteorlar By Gürcan Keltek
Milla By Valerie Massadian
Person To Person By Dustin Guy Defa
Sashishi Ded (Scary Mother) By Ana Urushadze
Severina By Felipe Hirsch
Verão Danado By Pedro Cabeleira
Piazza Grande
Amori Che Non Sanno Stare Al Mondo by Francesca Comencini
Atomic Blonde by David Leitch
Chien by Samuel Benchetrit
Demain Et Tous Les Autres Jours by Noémie Lvovsky
Drei Zinnen By Jan Zabeil
Good Time By Ben Safdie, Joshua Safdie
Gotthard - One Life, One Soul By Kevin Merz
I Walked With A Zombie By Jacques Tourneur
Iceman By Felix Randau
Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres By Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Lola Pater By Nadir Moknèche
Sicilia! By Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet
Sparring By Samuel Jouy
The Big Sick By Michael Showalter
The Song Of Scorpions By Anup Singh
What Happened To Monday? By Tommy Wirkola
Fuori concorso
Acta Non Verba by Yvann Yagchi
Anatomia del Miracolo by Alessandra Celesia
Azmaish by Sabiha Sumar
Choisir a vingt hans by Villi Hermann
Contes de juillet by Guillaume Brac
Grandeur et decadence d´un petit commerce de cinema by Jean-Luc Godard
Ibi by Andrea Segre
Le Venerable W. by Barbet Schroeder
Nazidanie by Boris Yukhananov and Aleksandr Shein
Nothingwood by Sonia Kronlund
Nous sommes jeunes et nous jours sont longs by Léa Forest and Cosme Castro
Piazza Grande by Misha Gyorik and Michael Beltrami
Pietra tenera by Aurélie Mertenat
Prototype by Blake Williams
Sand und Blut by Matthias Krepp and Angelika Spangel
The Reagan Show by Pacho Velez and Sierra Pettengill
Willkommen in der Schweiz by Sabine Gisiger
Semaine de la critique
Blood Amber by Yong Chao Lee
Das Kongo Tribunal by Milo Rau
Družina by Rok Biček
Favela Olímpica by Samuel Chalard
Las cinéphilas by María Álvarez
Senorita Maria, la falda de la Montana by Rubén Mendoza
The Poetess by Stefanie Brockhaus and Andreas Wolff
