At the Locarno Film Festival, shivers under the heat wave
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At the Locarno International Film Festival, whose 75e edition takes place from August 3-13, the international competition has turned into a guessing game for critics. Who knows this Portuguese director, Carlos Conceiçao, born in 1979, author of the amazing Nacao Valente (Tommy Guns), apart perhaps from those who had followed his first steps from Locarno to Cannes? Has anyone ever seen a film by the Azerbaijani Hilal Baydarov, or the Indian Mahesh Narayanan, originally from Kerala? What about this German visual artist, Helena Wittmann, and the filmmaker born in Costa Rica, Valentina Maurel?
Appointed in 2020, the new artistic director of Locarno, Giona A. Nazzaro, former general delegate of Critics’ Week at the Venice Film Festival, follows in the footsteps of his emblematic predecessors – Olivier Père (2010-2012), Carlo Chatrian (2012-2018), Lili Hinstin (2018-2020) – welcoming new signings, drafting films refused at Cannes or elsewhere.
Thus, among the seventeen feature films competing for the Golden Leopard, only a handful of them come 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 which will award the fawn statuette. Which is chaired by the Swiss producer Michel Merkt (Synonymsby Nadav Lapid, Toni Erdmanby Maren Ade…), and which includes, among others, the filmmaker Alain Guiraudie, whose work is adventurous and magnetic (The unknown lake, Stay upright, Come, I will take you there).
Mistakes of the XXe century
The “coolness” of the competition, so to speak, is inversely proportional to the ambient heat… In Locarno, the water of Lake Maggiore has become lukewarm like a bath for baby swimmers, and the official festival car, proudly exposed on the lawns bordering 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 manifestation.
In Stone Turtle, the Malaysian Ming Jin Woo takes on a fragmented story, his fifth feature film navigating between thriller, societal film, B series, the same character dying in hemoglobin before finding himself safe and sound the next shot – as if he first had to consider the worst in order to then try to find a way through adversity. Zahara (Asmara Abigail), a refugee on a remote island in Malaysia, survives by selling turtle eggs on the black market. One day, a man (Bront Palarae) introduces himself as an academic, studying endangered species. Enigmatic and powerful like a Godard, Stone Turtle turns out an intense game of liar poker, the character of Asmara, pacing the coast in her red dress, reminding us Anna Karina in Pierrot le fou (1965), with a very fragile line of luck.
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