This was my first year at Locarno, and besides the blossoming sunsets and pastoral green that surrounded me, I was similarly impressed by the films that were on display. With the exception of Nicole Vergole’s The Landscape and The Fury, my focus was spent on the Main Competition (Concorso Internazionale); I watched 12 of the 17 features. My tenure was bookended by the two most powerful works, both of which dealt with mental health struggles. The first Salve Maria (Mar Coll) dealt with a woman’s flirtations with infanticide, while the latter New Dawn Fades (Gurcan Keltek; pictured at the top of this article) proved to be a man’s struggles with his Turkish environment.

The two scripts were tightly directed and deeply focused. This couldn’t be said of either Saule Bliuvaite;s Toxic (incidentally, the big Festival winner) or Pia Marais’s Transamazonia, sprawling journeys into self-actualisation that were largely devoid of bite or substance. The third standout during the festival was the esoteric The Sparrow In The Chimney (Ramon Zurcher), a family drama rippling with ghostly undertones. What’s more the film utilised animal imagery that complimented the narrative: a dissertation on humanity’s cruelty to one another. Sylvie Ballyot’s Green Line utilised another ideology, a docudrama about war; Ben Rivers’s Bogancloch (pictured below),was a more palatable watch, exhibiting a Scottish hermit enjoying his best life.

The main character in Sara Fgaier’s Weightless revisited his past through a beautifully written diary, while another person, a “whore”, searched for new meaning in the highly stylistic Cent Mille Milliards (Virgil Vernier). Out of the 12 films, the most disappointing was the gratuitously violent Death Will Come (Christoph Hochhäusler), although it did present a new central action hero: a female to boot. Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino’s Luce was a venturesome depiction of happiness in a technological world, while Laurinas Bayresas’s Drowning Dry demonstrated an unbreakable bond between sisters.

There was a common theme found among the 13 films that I watched, and that was survival. Great art stems from the creator’s determination to accomplish their piece in a world that does everything to ruin their advances. The same, it would seem, applies to terrific storytelling.

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The winners

This year’s big award winners did not entirely coincide with mine. The jury was headed by Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner. They are listed below:

• Golden Leopard: Toxic (Saule Bliuvaite);
• Special Jury Prize: Mond (Kurdwin Ayub);
• Best Direction: Drowning Dry (Laurunas Bauresas);
• Best Performance 1: Gelminė Glemžaitė, Agnė Kaktaitė, Giedrius Kiela and Paulius Markevičius for Drowning Dry;
• Best Performance 2: Kim Min-hee for By The Stream (Hong Sang-soo);
• Special Mention 1: Youth (Hard Times) (Bing Wang);
• Special Mention 2: Salve Maria (Mar Coll); and
• Golden Leopard Cineasti del Presente: Holy Electricity (Tato Kotetishvili).

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This was DMovies‘ fifth year at the coalface in Locarno. In total, we published 20 articles, including reviews from other strands and an interview (some of these pieces were authored by other writers, working remotely. Just click here in order to access the full list.