Locarno Film Festival 2025: “Tabi à Hibi”, “Hair, Paper, Water …”, “Yakushima’s illusion” | Festivals and awards

Memory is a funny thing. He can train and relax, wet and get rid of. It can also be wrong, probably because it is so aligned with the fluidity of time. In this last distribution of Locarno, there are three films which consider the effect of time and memory as a creative tool, a language and a method of human connection. And, in a way, each film explains how the film can act as a tangible way to keep memory and control time.

Few directors working today are also insightful on the balance sheet of loneliness and the desire for human connection as Shô Miyake. In his idiosyncratic boxing film “Small, slow but regular”, for example, he follows a very deadly pugilist who finds his support in his elderly coach. In “All the Long Nights”, a woman fighting against the PMS hits an improbable friendship with a man often struck by panic attacks. His last, “Tabi in Hibi“, AKA” Two Seasons, Two Strangers “, which had its world premiere in the Concorso Internazionale de Locarno section, winning the prestigious Pardo d’Oro (Golden Leopard), also finds it by focusing on an isolated woman in search of words that will contribute to finishing her solitude.

Based on the manga of Yoshiharu Tsuge Mr. Ben and his Igloo, a view of the seaside“Tabi à Hibi” also sees Miyake withdraw what has become a magic thing for him: the first half of the film is not the main story. In this case, Miyake raises this point literally. For the 45 minutes of opening, we are watching a film in a film. These are Nagisa (Yumi Kawai) and Natsuo (Mansaku Takada), two young solitaires who quickly pass foreigners to find comfort in the other during their summer dates on the beach. The vibrant photography of this seaside Paradise Drapes each scene in shades of blue and green, while the edition remains meditative but fast. Miyake does not hide that this film is not real. He often returns to Li (an Eun-Kyung moving defense), the screenwriter, because she is writing what we are looking at. But just when we had the essentials of this metatextual exercise, Miyake upsets the film.

The second moving half of “Tabi à Hibi” is moving away from the film with a film to focus on his quote. We learn that Li has taken this scriptwriting work to hire, and now she has exhausted and dealing with the consequences of a sudden tragedy. She leaves the city for the Woodland Mountains (Miyake displays a wonderful feeling of belonging in this context), staying in a deserted inn operated by Benzo (a Shinichi Tsutsumi retained), which, despite its mirror appearance, includes Li’s hard solitude.

There is a quiet kindness that stems from the friendship of Li and Benzo, all the more powerful by the tonal discipline of Miyake. This film does not take a melodramatic turn or works headlong towards its unpretentious poetic end, but devastating. It is measured and attentive to two taciturn characters who hope that they will always be able to write the next chapter of their lives. As the end you sneak in you, you feel like you have spent three hours in this world. Because Miyake’s style is so refined, it now looks like the kind of comfort watch you need to remember the life that is still waiting there.

In the sensory documentary of Nicolas Graux and Truong Minh Quy “Hair, paper, water …“Or” Tóc, Giấy và nước … “, an elderly woman living in a small Vietnamese village tells how she was born in a cave, grew up there, and is now, for the first time, heading towards Saigon to take care of her new little child. This new child is not his first. In fact, she has several. It’s alive.

Observation rich in observation and extremely beautiful, the winner of the presentation of Cineeenti del “Hair, Paper, Water …” follows her pursuit with the kind of artisanal intimacy that remembers Jonas Mekas. Graux and Quý, who previously co-produced the short “porcupine” (2023), document his trip using a vintage Bolex camera and a 16mm Kodak film. Often the camera shakes and shines, a bit like a home film. Who also shares an integrated relationship with this woman-she was the subject of her pre- “Viet and Nam” film “The Tree House”-and is able to capture unpretentious family moments, like the grandmother and her sleeping grandson in breadcrumbs or the gathering of three sisters for a portrait.

Similar to “The Tree House”, “Hair, Paper, Water …” is a film on the memory. Because she teaches not only to her grandchildren the RụC language. She also teaches us. In the first third of this 71 -minute tight film, she recites the names of animals and insects, sometimes imitating their sounds. In the following third party, she explains the landscapes and then the elements that support life. She also teaches us about local medicinal plants, which can remedy anything, joints from the core sprained. With these lessons, moments of sensory happiness: the sound of bats beat, dripping and falling from trees, form the second language of its people.

In addition to the environmental elements documented in “Hair, Paper, Water …”, Graux and Quý also notes economic inequality in Vietnam. There is a display panel that is read as follows: “Poverty reduction is the responsibility and duty of the people themselves”. Many in the city are factory workers who do not earn a habitable salary, based on family aid to survive. In this way, “Hair, Paper, Water …” shows that even in a modern world, knowledge of language and the meaning of the community that binds us in the past can ultimately guide us to the future.

In the overworked existential drama of Naomi Kawase “LLLUSSION OF YAKUSHMA“, Dr Corry (Vicky Krieps), French coordinator of pediatric cardiac transplants based in Japan, undergoes a loss both in his professional and personal life. The first was born from the many children she takes care of and who await an organ in a country like Japan which deals with such procedures like a cultural photographer. Intended to work in synergy, they often conflict with each other, the anchored medical account which ultimately prevails.

The follower of the follower of Kawase cameras and movies often draws the best of her in “The illusion of Yakushima”, which makes it one of these cases “simply because you can do it, that does not mean that you should”. Opening, for example, is a wave of montages of nature – a good that it will strike far too often in the many transitions of the non -linear film between stories and years – which involve drones that sweep the seas and climbing on the mountains. A backlit kiss between Corry and Jin punctuates the flowery opening before embarking on a film that stops spontaneously through the events of the last three years: Corry meets Jin during a retirement of nature, their possible relationship and their painful break. During all this time, Kawase goes from digital to the film in a way that does not base us in Corry’s emotional tumult but the zap of rhythm and feeling.

Sometimes it is as if Kawase was aware of the romantic shortcomings of the film, mainly because the film folds around Jin being a Johatsu (people who deliberately disappear from their lives). Instead, Kawase relies on flashbacks to fill the whites with two characters who seem symmetrical to each other in terms of respective tragedies and desire for human connection, but are spiritually distinct. These moments of gaze, unfortunately, only overthrow the film, which means that Krieps shoulders an overly heavy load.

Conversely, scenes based on the pain of parents unable to protect their children from the failure of their hearts have a safer goal. Part of this is inherent; Which person is not deeply affected by the sight of an anxious mother or father? The actors, some of whom appear only for a single scene, and must therefore draw from complex emotions with little stage time to contain these feelings, also have a strong hand to win these movements in movement. More importantly, Kawase’s management becomes less expressive and more precisely, allowing the feeling of sorrow and desire for the film to take place in an organic way.

When “the illusion of Yakushima” does not settle in metaphysics, it is quite overwhelming. How can we face death? And how do we accept that we have to live when others have perished before their time? “The illusion of Yakushima” is preferable when confronting these difficult questions, which allows you not to have found the need to provide answers.