The Locarno Film Festival, whose 79th edition takes place Aug. 5-15, always features world premieres from around the world by established and up-and-coming auteurs, new hidden gems and cinematic discoveries, along with highlights from the festival circuit.
But audiences can also expect the unexpected. After all, Locarno also features quirky, edgy and offbeat movies just waiting to unspool.
So, buckle up for a ride on the wilder and more unorthodox side of the cinematic spectrum as THR presents its look at some of the more unusual-sounding films at Locarno79.
Wandering Trees (Alberi erranti)
Director: Salvatore
Section: International competition
Once upon a time in Sardinia. Piero and his son Giuliano lived alone in a farmhouse filled with injured animals that they cared for. But the local notables wanted to drive them out because they lived like vagrants. One day, snow fell, and Piero disappeared, while the animals were killed. So, Giuliano had no choice but to search for his father. On his journey, he met Maddalena, and it was love at first sight.
Giuliano’s dreamlike search across a wounded landscape explores the wonder and special experience of childhood, a time in life that provides a possibility of resistance against the violence of the adult world.
The filmmaker puts it into magical images – and words. “To tell a love story, you mustn’t be afraid to open up emotionally,” says Mereu, who also wrote the script with Alberto Capitta, in a director’s note. “But to embark on a fairy tale, you need to risk something. When you accept its rules, you have to accept everything – even the unthinkable.”
Objet A
Director: Ann Oren
Section: International competition
Ready for a bold, playful and stylized excursion into fragile relationships between humans as well as humans and nature, intimacy, desire, identity – and kleptomania – that uses the body as the core of its cinematic language? Well, Objet A is ready to bend your mind and leave you unsettled!
“Ingeborg and Adam are visionary hand surgeons bound by love, control and irresistible fixations,” teases a synopsis. But there is more: “She is compelled to steal objects; he longs to become one. When an accident brings the enigmatic Gaia into their lives, unexpected desires begin to take shape, unsettling the careful balance that has long defined their relationship.”
Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker Ann Oren (Piaffe) returns to Locarno to serve up a film, which she wrote with Geoffroy Grison, that features cinematography by Juan Sarmiento G. (The Voice of Hind Rajab, A Poet) and editing by Hansjörg Weißbrich (Rose, Late Shift). It stars Aenne Schwarz (All Is Well, Every You Every Me) as Ingeborg, Louis Hofmann (All the Light We Cannot See, The Forger, Dark), and Simone Bucio (Piaffe, The Ivy) as Gaia. “I’m interested in human desire and how it connects us to other species,” Oren says in a director’s note. “The human body is the starting point for my cinematic language: the more control we have over it, the more we separate ourselves from the natural world.”
Bloody Tennis
Director: Nikias Chryssos
Section: Out of competition
The world of elite sports is taken to disturbing new heights full of brutality and painful ambition in the new film from Nikias Chryssos (The Bunker, Rave On, A Pure Place). “Sophie joins a prestigious tennis academy where the brutality of competitive sports is taken to its extreme, and only the hungriest survive,” warns a synopsis.
Sandra Guldberg Kampp (Assassin’s Creed, Electric Child), Helena Zengel (News of the World, The Legend of Ochi, System Crasher) and others star in the movie, along with Elina Löwensohn (Schindler’s List), and Zlatko Burić (Triangle of Sadness), with an original score by Jim Williams (Titane, Raw).
If that’s not enough for you yet, the press notes also promise, or should that be: threaten, “blood-sucking leeches, hard-hitting serves and delicious nightmares.” Game on!
Bakma
Abdelhamid Bouchnak
Section: Out of competition
You have surely never seen Tunisia like this. And you likely haven’t seen a film from Tunisia like this before. What Bouchnak unleashes onto Locarno screens is an urban horror thriller, which he also wrote and edited, with cinematography by Chams Ghorab.
Animalistic violence takes on a different meaning in this movie. Commissioner Ali and Khaled investigate the ritualistic murder of a young woman. So far, so horrible. But there is more, as a synopsis highlights: “Her limbs have been severed, her head is missing, and in its place, the killer has grotesquely sewn the head of a dog.”
Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, in unveiling this year’s festival lineup, highlighted said about Bakma: “It’s a film that, in a very specific way, addresses the political corruption in Tunis at the moment. It’s also a very bitter commentary on what’s left of the so-called Arab Spring that ignited the overthrow of some regimes – and, as you’ll remember, it originated in Tunis.”
Tomorrow a Long Time Ago (Morgen vor langer Zeit)
Director: Luise Donschen
Section: Filmmakers of the Present Competition
Not much dialogue is used, or needed, in the new film from Donschen (Casanovagen), which stars Gerti Drassl and Manuela Biedermann and others. After all, life and actions say more than words.
Amid German reunification in 1990, the 50-year-old Patty first loses her job and then her friend Jelena. “In a small East German town, she collects discarded objects and meets the younger Franz,” teases a synopsis. “When her flat becomes so full of belongings that she can no longer enter it, she sets out into a colorful forest. A journey through landscapes and history begins, carrying away more than just her.”
The movie has a personal dimension for the filmmaker who grew up in the GDR. “Inspired by my childhood experience of German reunification, the film captures the moment when the present splits into ‘before’ and ‘after’,” the moment when everything seems completely unseen and very familiar at the same time.”
Donkey Princess (Princesa Burro)
Directors: Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña
Section: International competition
Once upon a time… wait a second, isn’t that how we started this journey into the mind- and genre-bending films at Locarno79!? But wait, this one is different, although love plays a key role again.
Diana is the princess of an ancient kingdom. Her father, King Arthur, has forbidden love. So, when Diana falls in love with Lalo, the King banishes him. A synopsis teases where things go from here: “Using a magical bracelet, Diana travels to other worlds in search of her love. Discovering that her father manipulates her decisions, she must face her fears and change her destiny.”
The travels of the protagonist allow the director duo to play with the look and feel of the places she visits. “Diana travels through parallel worlds where each universe transforms the film’s genre,” León and Cociña explain. “The film brings this constant mutation of realities into live action, where fantasy reshapes everything.”
So, who’s ready for a cinematic trip!?
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