Chasing the Golden Leopard

Locarno’s 2024 edition will be Giona A. Nazzaro’s fourth as artistic director, and he tells Deadline’s Zac Ntim that The Flood, premiering out of competition, is “a very precise film that asks what happens when history comes knocking at your door but you don’t recognize it.” Talking to the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough, Nazzaro notes that when he’s asked—as every festival director is, year in and year out—if there are any thematic threads running through the lineup, he usually says no. But this year is different. “First and foremost is the theme of the fear of an authoritarian world,” he says. “You can see it in films about families, films about institutions, films about relationships that become tyrannical, and so on.”

More than two hundred films in eleven sections will screen through August 17, and seventeen of them are in the running for the top prize, the Golden Leopard. Jessica Hausner (Little Joe, Club Zero) will preside over the main competition jury, and her very first film, the 1995 short Flora, won an award in Locarno. “My experience from being on juries is that every person sees a different film,” she tells Georg Szalai in the Hollywood Reporter. Hausner is currently writing her next feature, Toxic, which will address exploitation in the workplace in four episodes.

As it happens, one of the contenders for the Golden Leopard is also called Toxic, and Nazzaro tells Ntim that he “would definitely suggest you keep a watchful eye” on this debut feature from Lithuanian director Saulė Bliuvaitė. With the story of two thirteen-year-olds growing up in a bleak industrial city, Bliuvaitė says she aims “to explore the concept of the human body—the body as a project, currency, an object of desire, the body as a source of pain and magic.”

There’s another Lithuanian film in the main competition, Drowning Dry, the second feature from Laurynas Bareiša, who won the Orizzonti Award in Venice for Pilgrims (2021). Two sisters and their families are spending a weekend in the country when, after a tragic accident, they both become single mothers. Bareiša tells Variety’s Rafa Sales Ross that he shot the film himself because he “wanted a feel for the camera, to go into the set and be able to maybe find something hidden within the scene.”

Drowning also plays a pivotal role in Mar Coll’s Salve Maria, which opens the competition tomorrow afternoon. A young mother and writer becomes obsessed with a news story about a woman who has drowned her ten-month-old twins in a bathtub. “Trapped in relentless guilt and social misunderstanding, she faces the fear of her own monstrous condition,” says Coll.

Also premiering tomorrow is Death Will Come, which sees Christoph Hochhäusler delving further into his exploration of genre tropes after last year’s Till the End of the Night. Sophie Verbeeck plays a professional killer hired by an underworld kingpin (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) to track down the murderer of one of his couriers. “What fascinates me about gangster films,” says Hochhäusler, is “how directly you can speak of fate and death, circumventing the realisms of contemporary cinema. As a ‘modern form of tragedy’ (Jean-Pierre Melville) the genre playfully performs last ‘rites.’”

In 2005, Ben Rivers was living in London and thinking about getting away from it all when he met Jake Williams, a former sailor who’d done just that. Rivers visited Williams’s isolated home in the Scottish highland forest and shot a short film, This Is My Land (2007), and then a feature, Two Years at Sea (2011). With Bogancloch, Rivers checks in on Williams again, and he tells Variety’s Jamie Lang that he plans to do so at least once more in another ten years. “Aesthetically, I aim for a dreamlike, atmospheric feel rather than an explanatory approach,” says Rivers.

A young worker toiling away in a leather factory in southern Italy and getting nowhere is struck by an idea that could change the course of her life in Luce.“Our working method is the one we love most,” directors Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino tell Camillo De Marco at Cineuropa: “a screenplay rewritten day by day, real places, real people, continuous shooting, acting which is no longer fiction but which plays out all on its own.”

In The Strange Little Cat (2013), a family prepares for an evening with relatives and “the conflicts were passive aggressive and not very explicit,” Ramon Zürcher tells Marta Bałaga in Variety. Zürcher’s follow-up, The Girl and the Spider (2021), codirected with his twin brother, Silvan, broadened the canvas a bit, and now in The Sparrow in the Chimney, the families of two sisters gather in the country home where they grew up in the shadow of their overbearing mother.

“These people say these horrible things to each other,” says Zürcher, and “they can be so mean, and yes, you almost have to laugh a little bit. Not because it’s funny, but because it’s so over-the-top. Sometimes, humor and sadness are like siblings. They influence each other.”

Gian, an ethnomusicology professor struggling in his midsixties with amnesia, tries—and fails—to end things in Sara Fgaier’s Weightless. The daughter he doesn’t recognize moves in and discovers a diary that prompts Gian to try to salvage the memories of an affair he had forty years ago. “It is not about Gian recreating the past, but about discovering it,” says Fgaier.

Choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger stars in Kurdwin Ayub’s Moon as a former martial-arts fighter hired by a wealthy Jordanian to train his three daughters. She finds the young women cut off from the outside world and under constant surveillance and begins to wonder what she’s been hired for. “It’s all about sisters, no matter where they come from, and about cages, no matter where they are,” says Ayub, whose Sonne won a best first feature award in Berlin in 2022.

Young women in Monaco stay up all night dreaming of untold riches in Virgil Vernier’s A Hundred Thousand Billions. Pia Marais aims to explore the possibility of unconditional love in Transamazonia, the story of a missionary’s daughter who becomes a miracle healer. Coproduced by Pedro Costa, Marta Mateus’s first feature, Fire of Wind, tracks the history of a southern Portuguese community from its resistance to the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, who was prime minister from 1932 to 1968, to the present day.

Youth (Hard Times) is the second feature in Wang Bing’s trilogy of portraits of young workers in China. Last year’s Youth (Spring) won the Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary Feature, and Youth (Homecoming) will premiere in competition in Venice. Another documentary, Sylvie Ballyot’s Green Line, reconstructs 1980s war-torn Beirut as miniature sets that cowriter Fida Bizri uses to confront the ex-militiamen who terrified her when she was a child.

In Agora, the third feature from Ala Eddine Slim, three Tunisians who disappeared years ago return to their remote town, sparking tensions within the community. A young man searches Istanbul for divine revelation in New Dawn Fades, the first feature from Gürcan Keltek, who believes that “insanity is just another social construct.”

On Monday, Cinema Guild announced that it had taken North American rights to Hong Sangsoo’s In Another Country (2012), Right Now, Wrong Then (2015), and Hong’s thirty-second film, By the Stream. Kim Minhee plays Jeonim, a lecturer at a women’s university who asks her uncle (Kwon Haehyo), a blacklisted actor and director, to direct a short play being staged by her department. According to Cinema Guild, as “the circumstances surrounding the scandal grow more complicated, the moon waxes in the sky each night, and every morning Jeonim goes to the stream and sketches to grasp its patterns.”