If you were to collect all the horrific props (firecrackers, fake blood, weapons) used to make the films at the 77th Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland, which runs from August 7 to 17, you could stage a gigantic vampire or apocalypse party in the Piazza Grande. Life is on the wane and the horizon is darkening, if the scripts to several works from the competition and parallel sections are anything to go by. Special mention goes to Agora, by Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim, in the running for the Golden Leopard – the awards ceremony is scheduled for Saturday evening, the 17th – in which a raven talks to a blue dog about human folly. We've also seen a girl rasp her hand with a cheese grater, another set herself on fire...
At the start of the festival, artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro described a selection of films reflecting "the state of the world," and it's true that by this yardstick there's plenty to be worried about. The art of some of the directors whose feature-length films are competing for the Golden Leopard has been to sublimate these perils into surprising subject matter, undaunted by any taboos. This should not displease the jury president, Austrian director Jessica Hausner, an aficionado of the bizarre who contemplated the disruption of bodies in her film Club Zero, which competed at Cannes in 2023.
In Salve Maria, Spanish director Mar Coll turns a tale of motherhood into a thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock – albeit a little weighed down by an emancipatory theme: After giving birth, a young writer feels lonely and has murderous urges, while her newborn baby never stops crying and spitting up. Dark thoughts arise while bathing the baby, a theme surprisingly echoed in another film in the competition, Mond, by Kurdish-Austrian director Kurdwin Ayub. With ferocious humor, the heroines of these two dramas explain that it's much easier to kill a small child than to raise one.
As the screenings progressed, these poisonous dialogues began to resonate with other works revisiting devastating conflicts, bridging the intimate to the political. For example, Sylvie Ballyot's documentary Green Line, also in the running for the Golden Leopard, is about the war in Lebanon and made with an audacious device: a scale model reconstituting entire districts of Beirut in turn demolished and rebuilt, with tiny Playmobil-like characters.
Moving back and forth between this setting and the reality of the disfigured city, Fida, a woman born in 1975 in Beirut who grew up surrounded by bombs and gunfire, conducts a series of interviews with people who witnessed the events, in a tireless attempt to understand. They all agree that it is identity-based struggles that perpetuate wars, with each side refusing to give up its "cause." To this, Fida replies: "If we gave up these clan labels, and reasoned as human beings, it wouldn't occur to us to take someone's life." At Locarno, a message of peace rose from the screen like white smoke in the middle of a murderous summer, while negotiations are underway to avoid an escalation of the conflict in the Middle East.
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