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Locarno 2025: A Cinema of Risks
Dracula A few black-and-white photos of Locarno’s first editions hung from the walls of the hotel that hosted me there for five days this month. Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town—none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater—the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they’re watching Giacomo Gentilomo’s My Sun—a crowd-pleaser with which the festival, just relocated from Lugano, opened the first edition in the city it’d be renamed after. I struggle to believe that the audience smiling for the camera could have imagined this Belle Époque marvel shuttered and shrouded in ivy; the Grand Hotel closed in 2005 and has since towered over Lago Maggiore like a spectral sentinel.
Launched as a primarily social event in the hopes of attracting more tourists to the Swiss shores of its lake, Locarno’s historically juggled commercialist imperatives and curatorial bravado. But for every big title that graced the screen at the Grand Hotel and elsewhere, the organizers always found ways to squeeze in more left-field offerings—this was one of the very first festivals in the West to welcome films from the Socialist Bloc, sandwiching John Wayne vehicles between Soviet and Chinese productions. That careful balancing act has survived intact through the decades and continues to shape the festival’s strategy under Giona A. Nazzaro, now in his fifth edition as Locarno’s artistic director—in my book, the strongest since he took over in 2021.
All I knew about the fest before my first trip in 2017 was that, of all the biggest events of its kind around Europe, it was the most receptive to the experimental—whatever that means—but Locarno can often trigger a cognitive dissonance. Offbeat works from niche and emerging cineastes screen next to blockbusters and megastars; if last year’s biggest headline was Bollywood emperor Shah Rukh Khan, Locarno78’s was Jackie Chan, who took home a Career Award. I have no doubt several among those who flocked to the city in 2024 and 2025 did so to catch a glimpse of the two, and if the presence of a world-renowned celebrity helps to amass and divert resources to champion smaller titles, we’re all the better for it.
No programming felt bolder than the inclusion of Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due, Abdellatif Kechiche’s final installment in a trilogy on young love in 1990s Occitane that kicked off in 2017 with Canto Uno and resumed two years later with Intermezzo, a film famed for the deadeningly large amount of close-ups of female buttocks, 13 minutes of unsimulated cunnilingus and the derisive howls and walkouts that welcomed its Cannes premiere. That was the first and last anyone heard of it; undistributed, vilified and unfindable online, Intermezzo turned into an inaccessible film maudit, and that Canto Due might follow suit was reason enough for a few people to attend Locarno.
Neither an act of self-immolation nor a return to form, this most conventional of the three Mektoub chapters is a much more innocuous and tedious affair. Save for aspiring filmmaker Amin (Shaïn Boumédine), most of the beautiful ensemble cast that partied their way through the first two episodes are still stuck in Sète, a seaside town in southern France. Canto Due enlists two new residents: Jessica Paterson (Jessica Pennington), an American actress best known for her role in the fabulously titled Embers of Passion, and her much older husband Jack (Andre Jacobs), a Hollywood producer who agrees to finance Amin’s sci-fi script, a dystopian man-machine romance.
The Mektoub triptych always doubled as a künstlerroman, and Canto Due also unspools as a Portrait of an Artist as a Very Introverted Man (three films in and Boumédine’s protagonist feels as underwhelming as he did when he first graced the screen). But since the art in question is cinema, and since Canto Due is unmistakably concerned with the act of looking (and gawking, ogling, peeping…), it’s baffling to note how little of substance Kechiche actually observes. To be clear, the final chapter is almost prudish when pitted next to the others—the director’s fetishism for the female form is still conspicuous, but the nudity is reined in, the sex sporadic and chaste. Yet Canto Due shares with earlier instalments an insouciant disregard for its characters’ inner lives, and the way Kechiche and co-scribe Ghalya Lacroix craft some of them here borders on the cartoonish. Take Jessica, who spends nearly all her screen time feasting on food. Her pantagruelian appetite suggests a self-destructive behavior, but the director trivializes that with repetitive shots of the woman gorging on pasta and couscous in a way that turns her into the butt (pun intended) of a sad joke. At its best and most effortless, Canto Uno seemed content to just drop the camera in between its young drifters and watch as they flirted and bickered with each other, in a frenzy of sprawling and overlapping conversations. It’s the same M.O. for Canto Due, but cacophony is no substitute for characterization—it’s difficult to be invested in id-propelled ciphers. Shot by Marco Graziaplena, the shallow-focus cinematography and unnerving proximity to these bodies don’t do the film any favors. Canto Due isn’t just a cumulatively dull journey; it’s also visually numbing. For a saga ostensibly about young people, what’s most disconcerting about its finale is the way it strains to capture and radiate their vitality.
“Inert” and “turgid” are words I do not expect to ever throw at Radu Jude, one of very few directors working today whose films consistently register as a middle finger to established aesthetics and storytelling traditions. Shot on an iPhone and interspersed with lurid AI imagery, Dracula continues his ongoing project of melding high art with trash while stress-testing the medium’s limits. The diegesis is easy enough to sum up—a creatively impotent filmmaker turns to an AI bot (VLAICU2000) to spit out a handful of takes on the titular vampire—but the actual experience of watching it defies facile descriptions. Spanning nearly three hours, Dracula unfurls as a series of episodes around Romania’s most famous bloodsucker, some of which see Jude invoke other illustrious spins on the monster (Murnau’s, Dreyer’s, Coppola’s) only to bastardize them with a no-holds barred mix of vulgarity and puerility.
Beneath the dick jokes, profanities and endless references (to Bruegel, Chaplin, Putin, Pirandello and dozens of others) are two clear projects. First, Dracula offers a palimpsestic snapshot of 21st century Romania, thus continuing Jude’s attempts to retrace the country’s past beneath its shiny capitalist façades while interrogating its position of servitude toward larger, more “important” European nations. Secondly, the film probes the nexus between AI and the seventh art. I wouldn’t call it a “takedown” of artificial intelligence; demented as the input from VLAICU2000 often is—the film opens with a chorus of computer-generated voices intoning “I’m Vlad the Impaler Dracula, you can all suck my cock”—Jude doesn’t seem interested in deriding the new technology so much as acknowledging its existence. Here’s a new thing that’s shaping the way we see and interact with each other—why ignore it? Already in the appropriated webcam-supercut of Sleep #2 (2024) and the TikTok-heavy Do Not Expect too Much from the End of the World (2023), among others, Jude was eager to bring cinema in conversation with other media, an impulse that in Dracula itself feels vampiric.
Whether or not this shamelessly irreverent monster of a film amounts to something revelatory is a different question altogether. Halfway through, all the crass jibes stopped giving me new things to think about. For a while I let myself be lulled by Dracula’s CG imagery, but that strange mystique died out too, at which point the journey grew repetitive. I’m not sure Jude is after a Major Point about the state of AI and what must be done about it—and that’s no indictment! Perhaps the kind of fatigue I nursed upon being pelleted for 170 minutes with a downpour of quotes and jokes and hideous images is only natural. At any rate, I can’t think of many filmmakers who’ve so eloquently spoken to our screen-infested zeitgeist; exasperating as it can be, Dracula testifies to Jude’s ongoing attempts to challenge our expectations about what cinema can look like and do.
Dracula was not the only Pardo d’Oro contender shot on a mobile. Having lensed his first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), on a Sony Ericsson W595, Alexandre Koberidze turned to the same device for his third, Dry Leaf. A three-hour road trip across Georgia’s countryside, the film centers on a father, Irakli (played by Koberidze’s own, David) searching for his 28-year-old daughter Lisa, a photographer who was supposed to take pictures of rural football fields around the country but vanished before she could complete the assignment. Accompanying Irakli is one of his daughter’s coworkers, Levan—but, “like many others in this film’s reality,” an omniscient narrator warns as Koberidze’s cell phone lingers on an unassuming street corner, the young man is invisible, one of several ghosts that interact with Irakli as disembodied voices. Aided by his brother Giorgi’s lilting score, which fuses a piano ditty with cavernous winds, the director mines an urban magic-realism aligning Dry Leaf with its predecessor, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky (2021).
Nothing about his latest conjures that seductive pull more than its singular aesthetic. The W595 is a walkman phone from AD 2008 bedecked with a 3.20 megapixels camera filming at 15 frames per second— roughly five times less than state-of-the-art smartphones. It’s often impossible in Dry Leaf to tell things apart, with trees and fields and characters all fused together in amorphous shadows; the blurry and pixelated images are so distant from our polished, hyper-definition media regime that they might cause a sensorial short circuit. But for a tale littered with characters only Irakli can see (Lisa, Levan, a handful of children and elders), the choice to reduce everything to fuzzy ectoplasm with an antiquated lens speaks to Koberidze’s attempt to frustrate our urge to make the invisible visible. As the Ericsson’s camera must constantly adjust to the light, so does our brain to these shapeshifting frames, over which pixels flicker and pulsate like the cells of some breathing organism. The plot in Dry Leaf is thin to the point of irrelevance, Lisa’s disappearance nothing more than a MacGuffin, but the film’s pleasures aren’t intellectual so much as chemical, strange reconfigurations of color and texture that invite us to look at the world anew.
A few years back, Koberidze starred as a Soviet refugee and aristocrat imposter in Julian Radlmaier’s Bloodsuckers – A Marxist Vampire Comedy (2021), and though the Georgian doesn’t appear in Phantoms of July, Radlmaier’s latest emanates the fairytale quality of Koberidze’s works. Part of that can be chalked up to cinematographer Faraz Fesharaki, who’d previously shot What Do We See; though I only realized the connection after the screening wrapped, the shared grammar was hard to miss. From its whimsical register and creaky zooms down to a late-night romantic moment captured via a close-up of two characters’ feet (cribbed from a similar meet-cute in What Do We See), Phantoms feels similarly committed to wringing out a kind of magic from its mundane, present-day locale.
Split into three chapters tracking people who roam the German town of Sangerhausen’s cobbled streets in two very different centuries, the film kicks off in 1794, when chambermaid Lotte (Paula Schindler) happens on a glistening blue stone and daydreams of fleeing Sangerhausen for post-Revolution France. But her escape is cut short, at which point Radlmaier catapults us back to the present to follow Ursula (Clara Schwinning), a German waitress, and Neda (Maral Keshavarz), a young Iranian trying to drum up cash as a freelance travel influencer. There are other ancillary characters: a musician from Berlin played by Henriette Confurius; Neda’s childhood friend from Iran (or is it her ghost?); a Korean man offering tours of the region in his air-conditioned van. Mostly, there are surreal sights—camels riding across the fields, a slag heap towering over the town like a volcano—with Lotte’s rock bridging time and storylines like an ancient talisman. If the film’s concerns with class frictions and everyday xenophobia speak to the rest of Radlmaier’s oeuvre (see Bloodsuckers or Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog), Phantoms is a tonal shift from their acerbic mood and screwball energy, and for the most part a successful rupture. Save for the occasional on-the-nose imagery, Radlmaier’s gaze—as intrigued by his characters as it is by the milieu they traverse and the stories it harbors—evokes a strangeness that feels entirely earned. Movie theaters haunted by ghosts, kidney stones that turn into seeds—in another filmmaker’s hands, these flourishes would have come across as cloy affectations. In Radlmaier’s, they are consistent with the film’s oneiric universe and its attempt to restore a sense of wonder to the quotidian.
Mare’s Nest likewise marks an interesting departure for Ben Rivers. The British filmmaker’s cinema has long orbited the Armageddon, singling out outcasts who’ve traded the comforts of twenty-first-century life for a hermit-like existence in the wild, and his latest feels similarly committed to repurposing the end of the world as a chance for renewal. But the talky, meandering Mare’s Nest suggests a break from the long-take minimalism and wordless contemplation of its forebears. A catastrophe of unknown origins has wiped all adults off the face of the Earth, leaving nine-year-old Moon (Moon Guo Barker) to roam a dilapidated, grownups-free expanse with other Lost Children. Divided into eight chapters, one for each of the girl’s encounters en route, Mare’s Nest devotes its longest to stage The Word for Snow, a 2007 post-apocalyptic, one-act play by Don DeLillo that imagines a conversation between a scholar-turned-recluse, a pilgrim seeking his wisdom and an interpreter mediating between their languages.
If all onscreen adaptations of DeLillo’s writings have proved disastrous—with the notable exception of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (2012)—that’s largely because of their failure to transpose his dialogues. There’s a musicality to the way his characters speak, not to mention a humorous solemnity to their exchanges, you’d be hard pressed to find in works like Noah Baumbach’s White Noise (2022) or Benoît Jacquot’s Never Ever (2016). When we spoke after of the premiere, Rivers said DeLillo told him he wasn’t quite sure if the play would work as a film, but the choice to cast children in all three roles proves oddly fitting. Their committed, extremely serious line readings capture some of his writings’ comic majesty in a way no other adaptation had managed. This isn’t to reduce Mare’s Nest to a faithful translation—the film’s second half basically refutes the play’s overarching thesis. Prophesying from his mountain retreat, the scholar’s convinced that as the world crumbles words will eventually replace things (children won’t be playing with snow but “with the word for it”). Yet as Moon’s journey progresses, Mare’s Nest suggests the opposite, shedding its verbose earlier segments to swell into something more elusive. Shot on Super 16mm by Rivers and co-cinematographer Carmen Pellon, Mare’s Nest teems with hand-processed monochrome sequences candied with water marks; words and dialogues all but disappear, while the frames feel alive to the mysteries that haunt Moon’s path. Lopsided and confounding as it may come across, Mare’s Nest radiates the girl’s own curiosity for these uncharted landscapes, and the excitement is often infectious.
Having only a few days to spend in town, I’ll confess I didn’t venture outside the official competition as much as I’d have liked to (and regret not diving deeper into this year’s retrospective on British postwar cinema), though my best of the fest hailed from the emerging filmmakers-focused Cineasti del Presente sidebar: Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron. A Canadian-born daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Romvari has long cribbed from her own life story, and her feature debut calcifies some career-long preoccupations: the psychological costs of being severed from one’s history and dredging that up; the role filmmaking can play in that pursuit; ethical concerns one must wrestle with when exposing a painful, private trauma. A chronicle of a few tumultuous days in the life of a Hungarian family of six as they settle in their new suburban home outside Vancouver, Blue Heron again blurs the line between fiction and autobiography. Though told from the perspective of youngest child Sacha (Eylul Guven), the film belongs to her older brother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a cherubic teen prone to self-destructive tantrums no one at home knows how to deal with. Romvari refuses to write him off as a troubled child, much less decipher his unease, and the restraint with which she crafts her latest family archaeology is her paramount achievement.
Though hinging on an unimaginable loss, Blue Heron remains impressively understated. Maya Bankovic’s cinematography avoids manipulative close-ups, framing characters from a respectful distance. Tethered to young Sacha’s limited perspective, the film captures her parents and siblings behind windows and doorways, the camera zooming in on those barriers in a way that heightens the urgency with which thirtysomething Sasha (Amy Zimmer), in the second half, will rummage through the past to search for answers behind her brother’s malaise. Blue Heron offers none, because Romvari understands grieving and recollection as necessarily imperfect, open-ended processes. Like her shorts, her first feature foregrounds filmmaking and photography as essential means to rescue memories from oblivion. But even as it glances at those faded family portraits and tapes, Blue Heron registers not as a nostalgist’s reverie for the past but a director’s attempt to resurrect a time that’s now irretrievably far. That’s the tragedy propelling the film, and what accounts for its heartbreaking power. Without resorting to big moments or treacly statements, Romvari crafts a shattering story of personal and artistic catharsis; I can’t wait to see what she’ll come up with next.
Early into her 2020 short Still Processing, Romvari turns to a subtitle to share her unease about digging up a scorchingly intimate family history: “there are things that cannot be said aloud.” I kept thinking about that line throughout Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza, quite possibly the official competition’s most topical and incendiary entry. Shot on a miniDV on a two-day journey across the Strip in November 2001, early into the second Intifada, the documentary chronicles Aljafari’s attempt to track a man he’d befriended while serving a seven-month sentence in an Israeli prison at the age of 17. Except the director has no idea where in Gaza the man might reside—much less if he’s still alive—so the search gradually swells into a north-to-south travelogue across the enclave. Seen from the vantage point of this pestilential 2025, when much of the Strip has turned to rubble and its population forced to starve in a genocidal plan to obliterate Palestinians from their native land, With Hasan in Gaza becomes something larger: a corrective to the systematic erasure of a people, their turf, and history.
The camera is always alert to the omnipresent dangers the director and his chaperon face; Aljafari watches with bated breath as Israeli forces exchange fire with Palestinians and visiting villages are ravaged by the occupiers. But the film juxtaposes those sequences with more jubilant passages: children playing by the shore, adults chatting inside bustling cafes, street markets teeming with people going about their business. Life goes on, or rather, it did—revisiting these audiovisual mementos as the Israeli army is currently planning an attack on Gaza City leaves you wondering just how much of what you’ve seen has already been lost to the ruins of time. That’s Aljafari’s grand design. As committed as it is to documenting the senseless barbarities innocent civilians continue to suffer, With Hasan in Gaza also fashions a significant and refreshing counter-narrative to images of destruction. Only at the very end does the documentary shed light on the terrifying chain of events that led the director to end up in jail and befriend fellow inmate Abdel Ramin. In a few lapidary intertitles, Aljafari exhumes a long and unbroken history of violence, before wrapping both confession and film with two defiant words: I remember. If the festival circuit often seems to exist as a kind of bubble floating above the Real World, works like Hasan in Gaza burst it.
