Locarno 2026

As of this writing, the 2026 edition of the Locarno Film Festival is just a little over 24 hours from concluding. This year's gathering marked a very special place in my heart for being the first edition I had the privilege of finally attending in person, fulfilling a nearly decade long reverie. Upon first embarking in film production in 2017, the festival played a critical role in shaping which direction I felt I needed to traverse in to give needed clarity to where I wanted to aim as an aspiring artist, on top of programming what I perceived as the most refreshing & cutting edge work at the time (which still holds true). I couldn't tell you for the life of me what played Sundance or Telluride that year, but I sure still remember what did at Locarno (Ralitza Petrova's Godless won the Golden Leopard that iteration). The festival's programming during those impressionable years to follow would become both a safe haven of annual anticipation for what was most exciting to me in contemporary cinema, but also increasingly a goal post for where I'd hope to land at some point sooner than later. Though festivals like Locarno should probably never be an end point for a film, emotionally for me, it is also far more than just a means for sales & other further distribution. It's a sacred place of gathering where the most enthusiastic parties convene to communally consider the evolution of the art form and film history at large. Cynics may poke holes into that kind of sanctity, but it remains one of my last wholesome ideals. During my 4 days spent at this year's fest, I had the pleasure of seeing a decent handful of new works across a few different sections and my notes for which are as follows:

THE DAYS OFF (Lucila MARIANI) - An ostensible upgrade to the cinema of interliminality that another filmmaker like Jane Schoenbrun may be better known for inhabiting. Mariani's slight offset from her lead's immediate subjectivity (played with much astuteness by newcomer Antonia Robolini) opens the film's implicit plays towards a looming spectral force as a phenomenon to be dubious of rather than imminently conjured, further unsettling the possibilities of the immediate physical reality. Opposed to embracing an imminent digital horror, Mariani opts instead to ride out the eerieness that may be introduced to a physical space with something as nonchalant as an endless feed of autoplayed videos, where-in the algorithm can summon the most uncanny & supernatural of transmissions entirely from automated code.

ÜBERGANG (Peter BADEL & Chris WRIGHT) - Possibly more or less interesting a completed work depending on which turn filmmaker Thomas Heise's life & fate ultimately took. As a film originating as the last essayistic work of the late German documentarian and ending up as an emotional tribute to the man by his closest collaborators, Übergang's final form as half theoristic exercise & half testimonial is at once like nothing I've ever seen, for better or worse. What's legible as Heise's original doing is when the film is at its most activated, with passages of interrogation between the printed image and historical context more refined than ever. With that, the fireworks sequence in the film's opening is probably the most stimulating thing I saw from the entire fest.

KETTÍCE (Giovanni TORTORICI) - A film whose aggressively garish & tacky formal mode nearly checked me out within its first 10 minutes before gradually luring me back in and winning me over by the latter half. Tortorici's sensibilities appear highly receptive to a hyper modern aesthetic of digital zooms and constant movement (like that of a TikTok or Instagram reel as to not lull the viewer) that one may find themselves quickly allergic to, but it is in his complication of that trendiness with an underlying tragic provocation that snags my curiosity. There's a direct reference to Uli Edel's Christiane F. (1981) that is cited at the moment the consequences of its characters begin to come home to roost that seems key in understanding Tortorici's aim here.

VIOLENCE DU CORPS DE L'AUTRE (Denis CÔTÉ) - As potent (and pleasurable) an exercise in post-modernist self reflexivity that only an artist of Côté’s whims could impulsively conjure. The cinema equivalent to a kind of free form jazz. Thoughtfully unadorned, unvarnished & unsettled. Côté’s major skill is translating his very academic observations and straining them out entirely through his own production methods. What's left is the concentrated remains of unsolicited expression.

BRAVE NEW LOVE (Maria BÄCK) - Tis a shame that the film with the most evocative sequence of shots in its opening of everything I saw at the fest would turn out to be this laborious and exhausting. Contrary to what I perceive some may feel about the film's well treaded thematic territory, I still find much significance artistically in the exploration of one's sexual desires, but when the result is so rigidly conceived and sterile in imagination, I'm only left wondering how much is left til I am able to respectfully exit the cinema. Bless Maria Bäck who seemed overwhelmed with joy to be able to premiere her film at the festival.

YOU DON'T BELONG HERE (Florin SERBAN) - Registered to me as an especially major work, let alone the best of the festival bar none, within its first 30 minutes. Serban keeps the austere traditions of the Romanian New Wave alive and well whilst deploying a long term temporal arc that crescendoes with the full catharsis I'm sure he intended in the film's cantankerous & heartbreaking epilogue. Notable as well are a few scattered moments of dramatic liminality where-in characters completely exit the frame for prolonged durations and we the audience are coerced into uninterrupted dead space. I completely loved this.

I RARELY WAKE UP DREAMING (Isabelle STEVER) - The premise may turn some off, which can be unfairly perceived as a concatenation of political & social "relevance," but this is anything but opportunistic. Aesthetics of German modernity (of the Berlin Schuler kind) implanted onto the ethereality of its queer & Ukrainian subjects and placing intersectional realities at the fore of its images. Stever reads as being far less interested with arriving at any grand constellation of truth than she is with riding along shifting waves of tonality. There is a party scene earlier on among Ukrainian youths during a critical chronological inflection point that is aptly comparable to the one that introduces the friend group in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Millenium Mambo (2001).