It's raining awards for female directors, a downpour that was widely anticipated throughout the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, held in sweltering heat from Wednesday, August 7 to Saturday, August 17. At the end of the 77th edition, the Golden Leopard was awarded to Akiplėša (Toxic, international title), the first feature film by Lithuanian director Saulé Bliuvaité, by the jury chaired by Austrian director Jessica Hausner.
Presented on the last day of the competition, Toxic features teenage girls who dream of escaping their village in the middle of nowhere. A local modeling agency promising careers in Paris or New York becomes the center of attraction and the tall, thin girls seem ready to do anything to lose a few more centimeters of waistline (including making themselves throw up), reviving practices thought to be a thing of the past.
The camera, in a bluish, minimalist aesthetic, follows two 13-year-olds (Vesta Matulytė and Ieva Rupeikaité). This dark teen movie, with its criticism of societal pressure to be thin, resonates with themes explored by Hausner, particularly in her latest film, Club Zero (2023), which examines eating disorders within a group of students.
As for the Jury's Special Prize this year, it went to Mond (Moon) by Kurdish-Austrian director Kurdwin Ayub, one of the most stimulating thrillers of the competition, dealing with the clash of cultures (Western and Middle Eastern), carried off with nerves of steel by performance artist Florentina Holzinger, known for her radical performance art shows. In the film, she plays an MMA (mixed martial arts) coach who agrees to go to Jordan to train three sisters from a wealthy family. Once there, she becomes disillusioned.
Another Lithuanian filmmaker (and cinematographer), Laurynas Bareiša, won the Best Director award for Seses (Drowning Dry). In a rare occurrence, the four actors in this drama won one of the acting prizes, as their performances are particularly virtuosic and complementary. They play two couples struggling with gender stereotypes before the director decides to "break" his story to take it into a morbid, but thrilling zone – observing his cast of actors with a magnifying glass, making them replay scenes and work on redundancy – the director gives an unexpected breadth to this feature-length film of barely an hour and a half.
Hong Sang-soo's South Korean star and favorite actress, Kim Min-hee, received the other acting award for her role in Suyoocheon (By the Stream) by the South Korean master. In this work, the filmmaker proves that he can take on current events while retaining his stylistic grace. The luminous actress had already won the Golden Bear for Best Actress at Berlin, in 2017, for her performance in On the Beach at Night Alone, also by Hong Sang-soo.
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