With hundreds of films, 11 sections, 3 competitions and 20 awards given, the 2024 Locarno Festival did not disappoint. While it was impossible to watch every film, here are some highlights of the 11-day event.
Susan Kouguell – Senior Contributing Editor Script Magazine
Aug 29, 2024
Academy Award-winner Jane Campion received the Pardo d’Onore Manor, the award for outstanding achievement in cinema. When discussing Peel (1986), which won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes (one of my personal favorite short films), Campion expressed her initial frustration with her teacher who advised her to cut it down. When she took a step back from the project and implemented the feedback, it led to the film’s success. She added that she was unable to enjoy the success when the film first premiered as she and the producers were convinced they were not going to win and went to dinner instead. On the walk home from the restaurant, they were surprised when people kept stopping them to congratulate her on the film’s Palme d’Or award.
Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón received the Lifetime Achievement Award at Locarno. Cuarón, known for diverse films ranging from Roma, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to Gravity, expressed his vulnerabilities particularly about his anxiety around the writing process, as well as the importance of challenging oneself as a filmmaker and how he continues to reinvent himself as a filmmaker.
Stacy Sher received the Raimondo Rezzonico Award for her achievements as a visionary producer. Two-time Oscar nominee (Erin Brockovich and Django Unchained) embodies – and expresses the importance of perseverance, as seen by her long slate of films she produced, working in both the independent and studio system.“The more Greta Gerwigs and Sofia Coppolas and Kathryn Bigelows and Celine Songs we have, the more young girls are going to think, ‘There’s a job I could do.’”
Notable Features
On the Piazza Grande The Seed of the Sacred Fig written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof was greeted by exuberant standing ovations. Rasoulof, on stage with a translator, in a moving speech stated: “I had to choose between prison and leaving Iran. With a heavy heart, I chose exile.”
Director Mar Coll’s feature Salve Maria won the Special Mention prize for her gripping drama. Coll states: “In my film, I explore the troubling figure of the regretful mother. Trapped in relentless guilt and social misunderstanding, she faces the fear of her own monstrous condition, through a chilling tale unleashed by her imagination.”
Lithuanian director Saulė Bliuvaitė won the Pardo d’Oro Akiplėša (Toxic) for her ‘striking vision of the teenage female body as a battleground’. Powerful and unrelenting in its portrayal of two 13-year-olds, the film digs deep beyond the surface of the struggles of body image and survival.
Short Films
The Form written and directed by Iranian filmmaker Melika Pazouki received the Medien Patent Verwaltung AG Award. In this moving coming-of-age drama, the universality of teenage vulnerability is explored with honesty and a distinct vision.
My Life is Wind (a letter) written and directed by Iranian-American Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, successfully breaks the rules of incorporating voice-over in her moving and visually captivating film about a young refugee torn from her Middle Eastern home, who resettles in the American Midwest.
American writer and director Claire Barnett received the Concorso Internazionale Special Mention prize for her film Freak, which asks: What is your deepest, darkest fantasy? Pushing the boundaries of traditional filmmaking techniques and storytelling.
In The Nature of Dogs directed by Pom Bunsermvicha (based in Thailand), defies storytelling expectations; in what at first appears to be a traditional narrative film about a family of four, subtly shifts to a more poetic experience.