Do androids dream of electric dreams – Newspaper Kommersant No. 147 (7348) of 08/15/2022

The 75th Locarno International Film Festival summed up the results and awarded the winners. The main prize “Golden Leopard” was awarded to the film “Rule 34” by Brazilian Julia Murat. comments Andrey Plakhov.

It is unlikely that everyone will agree that “Rule 34” was the best picture of the international competition, but there is no doubt that it was one of the most provocative films. About half of the screen time, Simone, a law student, masturbates in front of a webcam or has sex with a friend and girlfriend in front of shelves full of books by famous philosophers and psychologists. The heroine masters BDSM technologies in practice – not necessarily new ones, a plastic bag stretched over her head will do.

The overarching goal of such experiments is to penetrate the underground world of violence, which is an integral part of the society of patriarchy.

Simone volunteers to help victims of sexual abuse and is a close researcher on the topic of domestic violence, which, she says, kills a woman every twenty minutes in Brazil. Having studied the habits of especially toxic Internet sadists, the heroine invites one of them with the nickname Mr Cock to her apartment in the evening: the film ends with his ominous knock on the door and the pangs of conflicting feelings on the heroine’s face.

“Currently, I am most interested in the debate about gender, race and decolonization that the black movement has launched in Brazil,” says Julia Murat. Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the festival, echoes her: “This is an important Golden Leopard for Brazilian cinema, for a country that has written significant pages in the history of world cinema and today stands at the forefront of defending the idea of ​​​​a more inclusive and free world. “Rule 34” takes us back to the anarchist glory of Brazilian “marginal cinema”. Bold political work, because the body is politics.”

Two more competitive films were awarded by the official jury. Italian “Gigi Law” (see “Kommersant” dated August 12) Alessandro Comodina was awarded a special prize. And the three remaining “Leopards” went to the picture “I have electric dreams” produced by Costa Rica, Belgium and France. Its director, Valentina Maurel, was awarded Best Director, Daniela Marin Navarro, Best Actress, and Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez, Best Actor. Of the main actors, it seems that only the black cat remained without awards, which causes a lot of trouble to his owners: he pisses anywhere, thereby expressing a sense of disorientation and protest against the breakup of the family.

Electric dreams are not only dreamed of by the main character Eva, who is having a hard time going through her parents’ divorce and her first sexual experiences; her very life is like a dream or vertigo. The closest person at this stage becomes her father – probably because, having lost his family support, he himself turns into a teenager.

The closeness of these two restless beings is about to reach the brink of incest, but this never happens.

Free mobile cinema is imbued with Latin American anarchism and the same electricity that makes the most ordinary faces of the most ordinary characters shine.

The focus of the jury’s priorities on “Electric Dreams” left without awards two films that clearly rose above the general level of the competition, these are “Fairy Tale” by Alexander Sokurov and “Sermon to the Fish” by Hilal Baidarov (the latter was awarded a special mention by the parallel jury of Pardo Verde WWF – the World Conservation Organization ). If Latin American films took the lead in the main competition, then in the second, under the title “Filmmakers of Today”, films from Eastern Europe were awarded: the Slovak-Czech “Night Siren” by Tereza Nvotova, the Croatian “Safe Place” by Juraj Lerotic and the Ukrainian “How is Katya ? Kristina Tinkevich (in addition to the special prize, the award went to actress Anastasia Karpenko). In the program “Week of Criticism” the Grand Prix was awarded to the Polish-German documentary film “Hamlet’s Syndrome” by Elvira Nevera and Piotr Rosolovsky about the young generation of Ukrainians, formed under the influence of the events of 2014. So, in addition to the Latin American theme, the Ukrainian theme also electrified the festival.