Locarno 2025: Good Trouble or Unruly Women (Understandably) on the Run

Last year’s Locarno Film Festival was the first under the newly appointed president Maja Hoffmann, an important (and extremely wealthy) Swiss patron of the arts, and regular festival goers were wondering if significant changes were coming amid our globally challenging era (in which the suffering in the Middle East grinds on, a Trump tariff of 39% for Switzerland was announced shortly before the festival, etc). In Hoffmann’s second year, however, the news seemed to be that Locarno would maintain its commitment to challenging and engaging art cinema, although Giona Nazzaro, who’s been serving as artistic director since 2020, announced in pre-festival interviews a desire to deliver some lighter fare for the heavy times. The competition did offer, in its Golden Leopard winner, a lighter and funnier touch than many years, and there was a cluster of clever comedies, even as they also register our moment’s melancholy. Locarno is known for featuring, in its competition, near parity for women filmmakers, and – perhaps related, perhaps not – in many of the year’s most notable films unruly women simply get up and leave, an understandable response to our disquieting zeitgeist.

The Golden Leopard went to Tabi to Hibi (Two Seasons, Two Strangers) whose English title hints at its two source stories from manga cult figure Yoshiharu Tsuge. Writer-director Sho Miyake weaves them into a clever film within a film. Two Seasons opens with screenwriter Li (Eun Kyung Shim) at work; we watch her conjure an unlikely romance featuring random encounters, conversations full of shy longing, and a cinematically scintillating sea swim in the rain. But Miyake then shifts to more quotidian aspects of Li’s routine, including a scene that finds her watching her own film with some skeptical students. One of them suggests that a film so full of movement should be more upbeat and fun. Li’s life is itself full of familiar struggles – self-doubt, boredom, writer’s block – and only changes once she travels, at which point Two Seasons becomes Two Strangers, as Tsuge’s second story kicks off amid a winter wonderland (at which the heat-waved Locarno audience audibly gasped). The lovely scenery revives Li, but she is quickly deflated by hordes of tourists crowding the local hotels, until one sends her up the mountain (and off the map) to an out-of-the-way inn. There, learning she is a screenwriter, the curmudgeonly inn-keeper, Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi) offers his own advice: movies and TV should be funny but also sad. Everyone (students, professors, old inn-keepers) is a critic, it seems, but the man’s contradictory advice captures the unusual and compelling tone of the film. He and Li’s conversations burgeon, platonically parallel to the film’s first pair, and underscore how connections emerge in unlikely, faraway places.

White Snail

Worthy winner of the festival’s Special Jury Prize and one of its acting prizes (shared by its two leads), White Snail opens with an overhead shot of Masha (Marya Imbro) as she lies on a narrow bed in her modest room with a plastic bag over her head. The grotesque image underscores the perilously blurry divide between beauty treatments  and self-harm, a line Masha has walked in her incipient modeling career in Minsk, Belorussia. After numerous documentaries, White Snail marks the first narrative feature by Austria-based directing team Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter. It is a daring and surprisingly moving work about a Russia-allied country whose cinematic output seldom reaches western festivals or cinemas. Imbro is a real-life model;her love interest in the film, Misha (Mikhail Senkov), an actual former morgue worker who, as in White Snail, really does craft massive, morbid paintings.  It was Imbro who introduced the filmmakers to the eponymous white snails, her pets that secrete a slow-moving facial treatment. This unusual constellation – the modeling industry, the body discipline demanded by it, morgues, and the efforts to make art out of it all – conjure an otherworldly place that feels simultaneously modern and mythological. Hovering over the global image industry – e.g., zoom interviews from China for Masha’s modeling jobs – are also the myths and superstitions of centuries-old struggles, manifested in Masha’s and Misha’s musings on whether to leave the country and its authoritarian regime behind.

Winner of the best director prize, Abbas Fahdel’s Tales of the Wounded Land engages the war in the Middle East in a circuitous, but utterly arresting way by focusing on artist and gallerist Nour Bolluk (the film’s producer) and her young daughter in their travels around their home region of southern Lebanon. With the documentary, Fahdel offers the most breathtaking opening sequence of all competition titles: a protracted drone shot above a winding funeral procession in southern Lebanon in February 2025. As the image slowly spirals out from one devastated city block to a shattered landscape of rubble stretching to the horizon, Tales gives us a sense of the immense scale of the destruction  – even as the film studiously avoids discussing those responsible for it. Fahdel then rewinds eighteen months to his family’s evacuation as the bombs begin to drop, the walls thudding and windows shuddering, eventually tracking their return to the rubble in November 2024 after a ceasefire. Similar to With Hasan in Gaza, another documentary in the competition, Tales avoids proselytizing about any politics while powerfully conveying the shocking human and natural costs of the war.

Another laboratory-like experiment with community and an unruly, mobile woman at its centre arrives in the ominously titled God Will Not Help (by director-writer Hana Jušić), which captures a group of early 20th-century Croatian shepherds amid a lovely, unforgiving mountain landscape. In their modest midst suddenly appears Teresa (Manuela Martelli, winner of the festival’s other acting prize), a Chilean woman claiming to be the wife of one of the shepherds’ brothers, Marko. She announces Marko’s death to his confused family as well as her plan to bury his bones, which she carried with her, to the land of his ancestors. Teresa also means, however, to integrate herself into their lives and economy. Abrupt cuts to grim, extradiegetic paintings add to an effectively portentous atmosphere – there will be blood in rural Croatia. The film is impressively acted and beautifully shot, spinning another migration tale rather reminiscent of Trier’s disturbing Dogville (2003), where everyone finds in the new arrival what they want to see and others terrorize what they purport to fear.

Dry Leaf

A special mention went to the much-anticipated third feature by Alexandre Koberidze, a loose family drama-cum-travelogue set in rural Georgia. Dry Leaf offers a highly original if lengthy (3+ hours) tone poem about village football fields, all amounting to rare levels of the oneiric and hypnotic. The premise provides a (literal) point of departure for the film’s travel, namely, the perplexing disappearance of a photojournalist who suddenly vanishes while on an assignment that sent her documenting football fields in out-of-the-way places across the country. Her father (played by the director’s own, David Koberidze) searches for her on these many fields, querying child players, meandering animals, the many lovely landscapes, and the lonely roads that link them – all of it shot on a late-2000s cell phone, the Sony Ericsson W595, in a grainy palette that bleeds colors in arresting ways. The many, many football goalposts, captured from every angle and provocatively framing the looming landscapes, recall both human’s propensity to play and the transience of the best laid plans in the face of nature.

The winner of this year’s “Green Leopard,” Ben River’s Mare’s Nest, also takes up nature and people’s relationship to it in pointed and highly original ways. Mare’s Nest offers the mythic hero’s journey routed through a lighter Lord of the Flies. Young Moon (Moon Guo Barker) traverses diverse landscapes and climates on a picaresque voyage that takes her from explaining the beginning of life to a turtle she picks up after a car accident to a conversation with a former scholar about climate change and mass extinction (based on a one-act Don DeLillo play, The Word for Snow, and here starring Moon and other children). Ben Rivers’ films are mysterious, unfolding at the edge of conventional narrative, but they also seem laser-focused on a more basic research about who people are. They are deep investigations into the ways human subjectivity changes in response to our increasingly tainted environments, usually centred on outsiders whose personhood seemed incredibly reduced but then burgeons into moments of hopeful exuberance. This constellation of changed bodies and nature is also the focus of Le Lac, by Jean-Luc Godard’s former cinematographer Fabrice Aragno. The film offers a balletic sailboat choreography with the wind and eponymous lake, tracking sailors as they dance with each other and with the vessel.

Another mysterious and moving exploration of corporeal and environmental change was Dane Komljen’s Desire Lines, which tracks multiple and fundamental transformations in the bodies of its main characters. Rather than any kind of cheap psychological arc – the characters remain extremely opaque – the film’s principals metamorphose in their relation to the evolving environments around them. These changes, akin to an existential evolution, begin with hints of queer sexuality, but quickly transcend it or at least expand queerness in a different, ecologically-minded direction. Desire Lines starts with Branko (Ivan Čuić) perplexed and even disturbed by his younger brother (also played by Čuić), who meets men in a park late at night. But the acts in which he engages there prove difficult to categorize. Although Desire Lines seems to be highlighting Branko’s discomfort at queer sex, any conventional intimacy is redefined more broadly, hinting at tensions between bodies and nature, including a military base, a dilapidated factory, a retro military unit, a clothed orgy of touching and writhing, etc. Bodies draped over buildings while also interacting with them longingly recall Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition (2013) – like the bodies and buildings it tracks, the film itself evolves into fascinating directions.

The Seasons

Set in southern Portugal’s Alentejo, Maureen Fazendeiro’s first solo-feature The Seasons offers a poetic panoply of voices and voiceovers – the images may be simply lovely, but the audio-visual bricolage proves highly complex and consistently engaging. Fazendeiro has collaborated, even codirected, with celebrated Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes, and her skills are on full display: her polyphony includes, for example, documenting everyday life in a region replete with both agricultural and banditry traditions. Amid this rich textual tapestry, certain themes slowly emerge, including archeology as revelatory palimpsests of history, conveyed here abruptly by German-language voiceover – letters from the researchers Vera and Georg Leisner during World War II. The letters from Germany’s troubled 1940s highlight the gap, sometimes deliberately cultivated, between enduring culture and perilous politics. 

Nature, culture, and the body are also the focus of Yakushima’s Illusion, directed by the prolific Naomi Kawase. Here, too, the movie feels a bit like two films in one. The first is a moving (anti-) romance centered on Corry (Vicky Krieps), a pediatrician from Paris working at a transplant center in Kobe, Japan. When this woman on the road is off hiking in the dense woods of Yakushima – a densely-forested, breathtakingly lovely island in Japan’s south-western archipelago – she meets free-spirited Jin (Kanichiro), who is photographing (trees, her) there. Jin is the opposite to Corry in both work attitude and daily behavior: although briefly shown busy with grueling fishery work, Jin primarily hangs around Corry’s apartment, a stark contrast to her long days in the clinic. Her work there with children requiring transplants provides the film’s other main storyline: Yakushima’s Illusion aims to educate viewers about cultural differences around transplants, including for children, in Japan. Krieps and Kanichiro both do an excellent job of showing the trials of balancing difficult work with home life, while the direction is highly accomplished, ranging from the staggeringly lovely shots of Yakushima to the high-stakes hospital drama.

Janicke Askevold’s Solomamma plays upon the anxieties and hopes of parenting and of partnering, with another bold woman galvanizing new variations on those age-old themes. Norwegian law has changed recently, such that would-be single mothers can initiate a pregnancy via donation. One “solo mamma,” whom Askevold knows, found her anonymous donor on social media after the baby’s birth and actually ended up dating him. In the film’s fictional version, journalist Edith (Lisa Loven Kongsli from Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Force Majeure), like many new parents, starts to observe certain tendencies in her four-year-old about which she wonders and worries. When the mother of a half-sibling (by the same donor) tells Edith she has figured out their donor’s identity, Edith uses her journalist job to interview him (Herbert Nordrum from Joachim Trier’s 2021 The Worst Person in the World). Anchored by engaging performances and clever stagings of high-stakes scenes built on everyday life’s basic questions (What do we owe younger generations as technology remakes the social fabric? And what do we owe each other?) Solomamma proves both highly entertaining and thought provoking.

Dracula

There is a great deal of running around in Radu Jude’s Dracula: victims fleeing the vampire; vampires escaping stake-wielding mobs; striking workers evading union-busting soldiers who happen to be zombies. Likewise, the film itself dashes in many, probably too many directions. Jude serves up a typically heady brew of exuberantly anarchic scenes, Brechtian chapters breaks, and fourth-wall games, all interrupted periodically by AI porn images, amounting to comically divergent Draculas: a Dracula working dinner theater with add-on sex work, a vampire amusement park, excerpts from Murnaus’s Nosferatu, riffs on Coppola’s blood-sucking blockbuster, an adaptation of a 1930s Romanian novel, “Capital Dracula” à la the famous essay by Franco Moretti¹ (name-checked here, along with Marx). The framing device is a filmmaker (the exuberantly funny Adonis Tanta) tasked with producing a Dracula film who resorts to AI (“version 0.0”) to save money (pressures and expectations familiar to most filmmakers nowadays). Shortly before Dracula’s premiere, Jude quoted an interview with Christian Petzold lamenting that genre cinema is not taken more seriously in Europe. Whether or not Dracula will be taken seriously, the film does emphasize Jude’s sheer creative audacity, taking ad infinitum and ad absurdum European art cinema’s engagement with sexuality and explicit depictions of bodies (mostly AI-generated here). 

  Hauntingly timely, Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza takes up the contested region through footage the director shot across the Strip back in 2001. Recorded around the time of the Second Intifada, in Gaza City and elsewhere along the coast, the material has a disturbingly uncanny impact, as Aljafari documents living communities, lively markets, and children cheerfully mugging for the camera that are likely all gone now. Despite moments of relatively happy normalcy, already in 2001 the area looks devastated. Most buildings might have been standing at that point, but the Gazans Aljafari interacts with en route already feel desperately imprisoned, provocatively asking the camera and the world: what kind of life is this being offered to us? 

Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due

In Abdellatif Kechiche’s Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due, a fictional US TV actor Jessica (Jessica Pennington) – another woman threatening to walk away – advises the young protagonist Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) to stick to screenwriting because directors too often have too much to deal with. This media-industry non sequitur seems to reference Kechiche’s own well-documented problems as a director, including around the Palme d’or winning Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) and then Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (2019). In both cases, the director was publicly accused of manipulating actors into, and within, explicit sex scenes. The news from Canto Due, however, was surprisingly good – Kechiche seemed to have adjusted, offering only one fairly brief sex scene that’s abruptly interruptus. Although some of the film’s themes are not exactly subtle – for instance, an American producer wanting to simplify Amin’s poetic screenplay for marketing purposes – Canto Due is particularly moving in Amin’s layered, low-key effectiveness in his portrait of a  young artist tempted by the tumult of Hollywood money and distracted by perhaps overly loving family and friends. 

Confirming artistic director Giona Nazzaro’s stated interest in at least some lighter fare were four distinct but quite effective socially critical comedies, including the stylized and stylish Le Bambine, (made by the sisters Bertani, Valentina and Nicole) about a girl’s coming of age and negotiating class and sexual differences in (the festival proximate) northern Italy and southern Switzerland – here, the unruly women are young but already skeptical of social conventions and restraints. Ivana Mladenović’s Sorella di Clausura offers a pointedly satiric angle on the unruly woman as well as on cult-like celebrity, at least from the supplicant’s perspective, certainly relevant for our genuflecting age. Stela (Katia Pascariu, a regular in Radu Jude films) has long idolized the Serbian singer and superstar Boban (played by the director’s father), whose cult unfolds at the intersection of protest politics and sexually charged subservience – Stela’s overtly erotic obsession entails more than detached music appreciation. Set right after Romania’s “ascension” to the EU in 2007 and just before the 2008 financial crisis, Sorella di Clausura radiates a certain anxiety around the need to keep in shape both financially and sexually. The frenetic, breathless tone, as director Mladenović confirmed, is more Serbian black comedy than Romanian New Wave.

Perhaps counterintuitively, two of the competition’s comedy-inclined entries came from Germany. In Rosanne Pel’s Donkey Days, the eponymous donkey makes an appearance only late in the film, well after an opening tense dinner at which Charlotte (Jil Krammer) introduces her girlfriend to her mother Ines (Hildegard Schmahl) and sister Anna (Susanne Wolff). The dynamics of the dinner serve up, in nuce, the complexity of the relationship among the three women, an aging free spirit matriarch and two starkly different daughters, one a teacher with meaningful interactions with students and colleagues, the other a career-oriented, hyper-corporate type wrestling with a painful loneliness.

Set in the former East Germany, Julian Radlmaier’s Phantoms in July (Sehnsucht in Sangerhausen) portrays the improvised solidarities of its small town, Sangerhausen, a minute milieu lovingly and amusingly observed through its marginal members. The atmosphere recalls Jim Jarmusch’s work, especially as Radlmaier turns to a  tongue-in-cheek travelogue in the film’s second half. Looming over the somewhat feckless but likable principals are two towering structures: a stone-heavy nationalist memorial (the Kyffhäuser monument), and a pyramid-sized/-shaped pile of coal extract. The Kyffäuser monument memorializes Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa, rousing from his sleep, as the myth has it, at the long-awaited awakening of Germanic power, while the coal pile recalls the area’s industrial past, unlikely to re-awaken. Given the region’s recent rightward turn against immigration, the interactions between locals and the more recently arrived is a key theme. As in Jarmusch, a surprising sense of community arises out of these provisional pairings, especially with women on the run amid comically haunted episodes in the history-rich but now rust-belty region.

Locarno Film Festival
6 – 16 August 2025
https://www.locarnofestival.ch/home.html

Endnotes