Locarno 2025 Reploche Film Festival | Features

Although it was only a year since the 77th Locarno film festival, it looked like an eternity while waiting for it. It was my second year to make the pilgrimage of the picturesque Swiss city by the sea which always promises a strong retrospective slate, an eclectic mixture of global cinema and the kind of atmosphere of fiery cinephile which flourishes under the invigorating sun.

Before arriving in Locarno, however, I made a personal trip. I jumped in Edinburgh, Scotland, for a few days to see Oasis during their reunion tour (an event that I have dreamed for 18 years). While I was walking in Edinburgh, who was starting his own film festival, I couldn’t help but travel Twitter and Instagram, looking at the photos of a festival that had already started.

I arrived during the second half of Locarno, singing oasis hymns and the desire for good cinema. Locarno did not disappoint.

The main competition offered an incredible range of modest films with a deep emotion. I was delighted to see Sho Miyake “Tabi à Hibi” or “Two seasons, two foreigners” win the first prize of the festival, the Golden Leopard. Miyake arrived for the first time in Locarno with his first feature film “Playback” in 2012. Since then, he has grown up only as a filmmaker, taking foot in the Berlinale, where his last two films – “Petit, Slow but Stable” and “All The Long Nights” – World in first. Despite his strong CV, he has not yet completely broken out. The recognition expected for a long time here changes this.

With the award-winning film by Miyake, the main competition also possessed the biting AI of Radu Jude “Dracula”, the film of the post-apocalyptic arrival of Ben Rivers “, Mare’s Nest” by Naomi Kawase, Vicky Krieps of Naomi Kawase, played the medical filmmaker “Yakushima’s illusion”, and Georgian filmmaker Alexander Alexander Koberidze’s Willuss Road Trip “Dry leaf”.

Locarno also delivered a surprising mixture of long -awaited works and new stories. Dystopian Western, “Legend of the Happy Worker” produced by Dunham Dunham, “Legend of the Happy Worker”, was filmed seven years ago before finally the world premiere here. The filmmaker of “Viet and Nam” Minh Quý Trương and his co-director Nicolas Graux won the Gold Leopard in the filmmakers of the current competition for their Vietnamese documentary entering “Hair, Paper, Water …” Canadian Filmmaker Sophy Romvari also delivered a stunning of “Blue Heron”. “The memory game, inspired by Romvari’s own life, was honored by Swatch First Feature Award. He will then go to the Toronto International Film Festival for his first North American.

The festival has also attracted a plethora of stars, some of which have received life prizes for their illustrious careers. The director of “The Holdovers”, Alexander Payne, was appointed Leopard of honor. The legend of martial arts, Jackie Chan, also stormed Locarno, receiving a delighted reception while accepting the Leopard career price. The star of “Stranger Than Fiction, Emma Thompson, accepted the Leopard Club Prize. And after a career that includes turns in “Kill Bill” and “Charlie’s Angels”, Lucy Liu was also honored.

The most difficult aspect of participating in Locarno, however, is to find a way to balance new films with old films. For example, in recent years, the festival has celebrated the 100th anniversary of Columbia Pictures and Mexican cinema covering the 1940s in the 1960s.

This year, they looked through the pond with a great expectation: post-War British cinema 1945-1960. Of the 45 films that screened for retrospective, I caught 14. In addition, I wrote on the program of two different perspectives. The first was an examination of the way “Pool of London” by Basil Dearden and “The Story of A Three Pass” by Melvin Van Peebles by Melvin Van Peebles “attack interracial romance and racism abroad. I also accumulated a list of the 14 films that I watched.

While I left Locarno, inspired again by the extent of the cinema I had met, I did it without knowing if I could come back.

Let’s face it: film criticism is currently taken in a desperate struggle. THE Chicago tribune Eliminated his position as film criticism, dropping Michael Phillips. Vanity Fair also dissolved his criticisms, releasing Richard Lawson. Ann Hornaday and Richard Roeper were bought by the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Totes, respectively. These are not outlets saying that covering film festivals is a luxury. They argue that writing on the film is outdated and useless.

A few months ago, I wrote an article on how the future of cinema is discovery. There, I argued that “the biggest obstacle, however, is to bring people to read these films. Critics can publish criticism, but if they are not read, then the point is not object. In this sense, the need for discovery is also the responsibility of the reader. ”

I cannot emphasize enough the role you play too. There must be curiosity to find out more about unusual art and think deeply. This work begins with the writer, but he continues with you. Thus, in a rapidly evolving landscape involving AI summarizing criticism on Google, several complex societies adhere to Chatgpt as a viable option for reports, and a general repulsion to intellectualism, local and national journalism, and people outside of our own telephone screens, the only antidote is discovery and support. Without them, I fear how far we are going to move. Not just as readers of criticism but also as social creatures.

Criticism, like all good things, concerns self -discovery, inspired by our interaction with an art form that reveals something about our world. It is also an “empathy machine”. Criticism can, in its own way, act as a conduit between the feelings of the filmmaker and the feelings of the spectator, which also understands the critic. If criticism is authorized to, through an enlightened knowledge of the film and history technique, and as an expression of the experience of a human, it can help the spectator to sympathize with a story that they did not know, a point of view that they never considered once, or a party that has never been heard.

I hope we will be in a better place this time next year. I hope that many of these points of sale will make the serious error they have made by turning their backs on good and brilliant people whose primary care is to support an art form on behalf of the people who love it. I hope that we are going to shake ourselves and our neighbors awakened with a harmful sleep that is coconoconut of the sinister threat that we are now confronted in our ways of consuming and nourishing our souls and our minds. I hope, this time next year, after many twists and turns, which I will be able to share with you stories about the many people I met and the films I loved too.

For six days in Locarno, I experienced a dream. For the next 12 months, I will live in the hope.