At Locarno film festival, chills under heat wave

The international competition of the 75ᵉ edition of the Swiss event gives pride of place to the new authors and the darkest works.

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At the Locarno International Film Festival, of which the 75 e edition takes place from August 3 to 13, the international competition has turned into a guess for critics. Who knows this Portuguese director, Carlos Conceiçao, born in 1979, author of the amazing Naçao Valente (Tommy Guns), apart from those who had followed his first steps from Locarno in Cannes? Has anyone ever seen a film by Azerbaijanis Hilal Baydarov, or Indian Mahesh Narayanan, from Kerala? What about this German visual artist, Helena Wittmann, and the filmmaker born in Costa Rica, Valentina Maurel?

Named in 2020, the new artistic director of Locarno, Giona A. Nazzaro, former general delegate of the Critics’ Week of the Venice Mostra, is part of his emblematic predecessors – Olivier Père (2010- 2012), Carlo Chatrian (2012-2018), Lili Hinstin (2018-2020)-Welcoming new signatures, replacing films refused in Cannes or elsewhere.

Thus, among the seventeen feature films contributing to the gold leopard, only a handful of them emanate from “identified” directors. Let us quote Patricia Mazuy (Bowling Saturn) and Sylvie Verheyde (Stella is in love), the Lebanese Abbas Fahdel (Hikayat Elbeit Elorjowani), or the Russian Alexandre Sokourov (Skazka). No international star either in the jury that will award the fawn statuette. Which is chaired by the Swiss producer Michel Merkt (Synonyms, of Nadav Lapid, Toni Erdmann, of Maren Ade …), and of which is part, among others, the filmmaker Alain Guiraudie, at the adventurous and magnetic work (the unknown of lake, stay vertical, come and take you).

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The “freshness” of the competition, if you can say, is inversely proportional to the ambient heat … In Locarno, the water from Lake Major has become lukewarm like a swimming baby bath, and the official car of the official car Festival, proudly exposed on lawns rubbing shoulders with the Piazza Grande, benefits from automatic watering. Everything is fine ! And everything goes wrong in the few strongest works, discovered at this stage of the demonstration.

In Stone Turtle, Malaysian Ming Jin Woo assumes a burst story, his fifth feature film sailing between thriller, societal film, B series, the same dying character in hemoglobin before finding himself safe and except After – as if it was necessary to consider the worst first to try to make your way in adversity. Zahara (Asmara Abigail), refugee on an island remote in Malaysia, survives by selling tortoise eggs to the black market. One day, a man (Bront Palarae) presents himself as an academic, studying threatened species. Enigmatic and powerful like a Godard, Stone Turtle turns out to be an intense part of a liar poker, the character of Asmara, walking the coast in her red dress, reminding us Anna Karina in Pierrot Le Fou (1965), with a luck line more fragile.

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