by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2019/2024

It’s the sixth annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d seen previously, unlinked are films of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Concorso Competition

South Terminal (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche)
The Science of Fictions (Yosep Anggi Noen)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot)
Technoboss (João Nicolau)
Twelve Thousand (Nadège Trébal)
Isadora’s Children (Damien Manivel)
Echo (Rúnar Rúnarsson)
A Voluntary Year (Ulrich Köhler & Henner Winckler)
Maternal (Maura Delpero)
Endless Night (Eloy Enciso)
A Girl Missing (K?ji Fukada)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina)
Bird Island (Maya Kosa & Sérgio da Costa)
The Tree House (Minh Quý Tr??ng)
Oroslan (Matjaž Ivanišin)
Nafi’s Father (Mamadou Dia)
Overseas (Sung-a Yoon)
Ivana the Terrible (Ivana Mladenovi?)
Here for Life (Andrea Luka Zimmerman & Adrian Jackson)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
Adoration (Fabrice Du Welz)
Vagenda Stories (Natascha Beller)

Concorso Shorts

Carne (Camila Kater)
In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)
Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)
Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)
White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Fuori Concorso (non-competitive, features by established filmmakers)

Giraffe (Anna Sofie Hartmann)
Felix in Wonderland (Marie Losier)
Wilcox (Denis Côté)

Moving Ahead (new forms and innovation)

Krabi, 2562 (Ben Rivers & Anocha Suwichakornpong)
Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland)
The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary)
Distancing (Miko Revereza)
Lore (Sky Hopinka)
Un film dramatique (Eric Baudelaire)
Tourism Studies (Joshua Gen Solondz)
Color-Blind (Ben Russell)

by ·Comments Off on Krabi, 2562 (2019, Anocha Suwichakornpong & Ben Rivers)

Laconically follows a few main-ish characters: a visiting actor on an advertising shoot and an unrelated location scout, and locals such as a tour guide, a retired cinema worker, and a caveman. Their little barely-narratives intermingle with ghosts and legends and interviews with the real(?) people involved. I liked it – even more so after reading Michael Sicinski’s writeup.

by ·Comments Off on Concorso Shorts 2019

Some shorts I could find online that played Locarno in 2019

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Carne (Camila Kater)

I figured watching an animated short unsubtitled would be fine, turns out it’s wall-to-wall narration in Portuguese. From what I can follow, five women’s stories about their bodies, chronologically through the life cycle, each in different animation styles (stop-mo, watercolor, flash, clay, Breer).

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In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)

Dry, serious sci-fi displayed in wide split-screen. Older woman in hospital bed is confronted by younger clone who questions her implanted memories and her purpose in the purgatorial present-day while the survivors of a global plague are kept indoors and underground.

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Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)

A movie about islands and earthquakes with distorted colors and cool sound design is for sure gonna remind me of Rock Bottom Riser. Gets caught up a little too hard in video effects wilderness but still my favorite of this bunch.

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Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)

Italian narrator (speaking French) is weird and sad about encountering a neighborhood of poor African immigrants.

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White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Adapted from a salon worker interview and a promotional film about giving white people afros, interspersed with Toni Morrison quotes, the picture highly distressed with film junk.

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Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)

Ninety percent of this is sexy Brazilians dancing, what is not to love?

by ·Comments Off on The Science of Fictions (2019, Yosep Anggi Noen)

Some poor guy “went to a forbidden place” involving a fake moon lander and got his tongue cut out, now thinks about outer space and moves in slow-motion (perfect scenario for a severe 4:3 b/w mastershot festfilm). Soon as he gets back his mom dies, but Siman works hard despite his speed condition, makes a small fortune, apparently travels through time (and through color + aspect ratios; I can’t tell when different scenes are set), and builds himself a spaceship-shaped house out of broken appliances.

The director’s latest is a D.O.A.-style mystery that nobody is watching on netflix. Lead guy starred in Noen’s Solo, Solitude, a couple other actors were in Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash. Later that night I unpaused the first episode of MST3K season 4 on my laptop, and the first line I heard was “poor bastard thinks he’s a spaceman,” which is proof that I’m living in a simulation.

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2018/2023

It’s the fifth annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d seen previously, unlinked are films of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Concorso Competition

A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua)
Hotel by the River (Hong Sangsoo)
La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
A Family Tour (Ying Liang)
Genesis (Philippe Lesage)
Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham)
Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor)
Alice T. (Radu Muntean)
Diane (Kent Jones)
Yara (Abbas Fahdel)
M (Yolande Zauberman)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

Fausto (Andrea Bussmann)
Sophia Antipolis (Virgil Vernier)
A Family Submerged (María Alché)
Dead Horse Nebula (Tarik Aktas)
All Good (Eva Trobisch)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont)
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)
Blaze (Ethan Hawke)
Birds of Passage (Ciro Guerra & Cristina Gallego)
Ruben Brandt, Collector (Milorad Krstić)
Searching (Aneesh Chaganty)
Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka)
Liberty (Leo McCarey)

Signs of Life (new forms and innovation)

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (Benjamin Crotty)
How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal (Eugène Green)
A Room with a Coconut View (Tulapop Saenjaroen)
Erased, Ascent of the Invisible (Ghassan Halwani)
Man in the Well (Hu Bo)
Gulyabani (Gürcan Keltek)
The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
Veslemøy’s Song (Sofia Bohdanowicz)
Communion Los Angeles (Peter Bo Rappmund & Adam Levine)
Sedução da Carne (Júlio Bressane)

Fuori Concorso (non-competitive, features by established filmmakers)

Narcissister Organ Player (Narcissister)
Acid Forest (RugilÄ— BarzdžiukaitÄ—)

Other Sections and One-Offs

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo)
Words, Planets (Laida Lertxundi)
Seymour: an introduction (Ethan Hawke)
L’Humanite (Bruno Dumont)
and a full Leo McCarey retrospective

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo Shorts 2023

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (Benjamin Crotty)

A bit of anti-historical fun by the guy who made Fort Buchanan. Napoleonic soldier Chauvin is resurrected to collect some award, his acceptance speech turns into a fantasy that gets away from him, leading to some resurrected medieval dude pitchforking Chauvin’s girl, and explaining that the reason Chauvin can’t remember his parents is that he’s a fictional character invented by playwrights.

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How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal (Eugène Green)

Carloto Cotta (Tabu, Diamantino) plays an office writer hired to create a local slogan for Coca-Cola, asks his would-be poet friend for advice. The slogan succeeds only in alarming the health ministry (led by Oliveira star Diogo Dória) into banning the drink. Also a bit of fun, but not as anarchic as Chauvin, calm and precise like La Sapienza, full of direct-to-camera address.

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Erased/Palimpsest: Ascent of the Invisible (Ghassan Halwani)

The goal was to watch this feature, but I turned it off after 20 minuttes, so adding it to the shorts. Logging a movie I didn’t watch is not standard procedure, but I make the rules here. It’s investigating war photos and portraits of the disappeared, memorializing them properly, drawing and animating them to give them new life, exposing missing-person flyers covered up by years of advertising posters. Serious and worthy concept, but the methodical slowness of it was too much for me – a single still image was onscreen for six of the first ten minutes, and I bailed during a montage of news articles on mass graves.

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A Room With a Coconut View (Tulapop Saenjaroen)

iMovie title effects and an AI voice speaking Thai giving a hotel tour, doesn’t seem promising. Then an English AI voice starts challenging her on the mechanics of what is seen, until we’re getting scientific explanations of how sea waves are formed. “Oh no, the images are bleeding.” A new English narrator appears as the male English narrator leaves the Thai AI and goes on a voyage… discussion of the nature of tourism… one AI smokes a joint. Great movie.

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Gulyabani (Gürcan Keltek)

Placid visual and narrated poetry, hard to adjust to this after the more insane Coconut View. No people are seen, narrator is a girl, molested by her dad, thought to be a prophet by the villagers. “Two actions may look the same, but one may be evil and one may not.” A very serious story involving military coups and child prostitution, but I was tuned out due to the problems of the work week. The director’s feature Meteors had played Locarno the previous year.

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Man in the Well (Hu Bo)

Not about a a man in a well… featureless hooded figures wander a post-apocalyptic wasteland looking for food. Very different from the Elephant movie, except in its pacing. They find a dead person and immediately dig in with a saw. I guess they chuck the body down a hole – is that the man in the well? Odd little movie.

by ·Comments Off on Hotel by the River (2018, Hong Sang-soo)

Aging poet Ki Joo-bong (the second section of Grass) arranges to meet his grown sons – Kwon Hae-hyo (film director of In Front of Your Face) and Yu Jun-sang (film director of The Day He Arrives). Only one of them is playing a film director in this movie and I’ve forgotten which. The other is going through a divorce which he’s hiding from dad, who wants to tell his estranged family that he feels he doesn’t have much time left.

two brothers:

Meanwhile upstairs, Kim Min-hee and her friend Song Sun-mi (also her friend in The Woman Who Ran) have been through some stuff and are hiding from the world, resting and getting hungrier. Both groups will finally move to a restaurant down the road where the soju keeps flowing, and the dad’s dark prediction will prove correct soon after.

Michael Sicinski:

Hotel by the River marks a turn in the director’s work, away from his preoccupation with male-female relationships and toward questions of family and lineage. Instead of observing ridiculous men embarrassing themselves in thwarted romantic misadventures, here we are seeing the wreckage that bad men leave in their wake.

by ·Comments Off on Acid Forest (2018, Rugile Barzdziukaite)

Observational slow-cinema doc, but that’s fine since half the subjects are Lithuanian water birds. Tourists chatter about the birds over the ever-present low chuckle of cormorant conversation. Mostly the people are being negative, whining how the birds compete with the locals for fish, then shit acid that kills the ancient pine trees – big deal. While there was handheld swaying in Fausto, this one feels like it was shot with hidden/security cameras, the crew returning a year later to collect and edit the footage. I could’ve done without the last 5 minutes of some dude interrupting nesting season with fireworks.

Cuties… if they want to kill all the trees and fishes, that’s their business:

by ·Comments Off on Fausto (2018, Andrea Bussmann)

It’s time once again for Locorazo, a home viewing series of films that played the Locarno Festival five years ago. This one played in the “Filmmakers of the Present” section for first and second features – in this case it’s her first solo feature, the previous two being collaborations with her husband Nicolas Pereda (Fauna), who only assists on this one (plus thanks in the credits to Joshua Bonnetta and Matias Pineiro).

Stories about lingering ghosts and missing shadows, a witch, psychic animals and astronomical events, told at night, often via narrator. “We live in a conscious universe, we just do not realize it.”

Dudes hanging out smoking, usually at night. The subjects of the stories are sometimes seen at an indifferent distance from the camera. A few unique visual moments: a text list of animals that can see better at night, a beach shot with an absurdly low horizon line.

The director in Mubi:

The concept of the search and searching was a central idea in the film and in the Faust myth. Much of the time we learn the characters are searching for a shadow, a man, et cetera. The theme of the search was something important for me to use, but also important to continue without a resolution. Faust, after all, wants nothing more than to unlock the keys to the universe and himself—something that, like Faust, we are far from doing. I’m never looking for a particular thing, but I’m always in the process of searching and exploring. I’m consumed by questions, which through the seeking of answer continually opens up new questions.