10 Locarno Industry Talents To Track

Manchester City are closing in on the signing of Jeremy Doku.

Iranian filmmaker Ali Ahmadzadeh clinched the Golden Leopard in the main international competition of the 76th Locarno Film Festival with his latest feature Critical Zone (Mantagheye Bohrani).

Releases keep coming but talent is not comfortable promoting films, even indies, even if productions have waivers or don’t need them. Where that’s leading isn’t clear. “Who’s going to take the plunge first? We’ll see. The festivals will be the big test,” said one independent distribution exec.

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International The Venice Film Festival is rolling out a juried impact award that will mark the first time a major film festival has awarded a prize focused solely on impact. Impact campaigns are crafted around documentaries and some narrative films that have strong social or political messages that can inspire action among audiences and the industry at large.

Fans of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills might miss Lisa Rinna next season, but Sutton Stracke says she and the rest of the cast didn’t even notice her absence.

Arthouse Crunch Over the last decade, theatrical arthouse markets have imploded soufflé-like. “We used to make 5,000 admissions per title, now the target audience is 500,” Peter Bognar, at Hungary’s CinefilCo, told Variety at Locarno. So, to close the gap and move hopefully into a little upside, having tapped subsidies and local TV pre-buys, producers are looking ever more to overseas public-sector coin, channelled via international co-producer partners.

Marta Balaga You can approach old classics just like new films, argued participants during Locarno’s Heritage Monday panel. “I talked to an exhibitor in Paris and they don’t consider repertory cinema to be different from contemporary cinema. They are collapsing both models into one and it’s very interesting,” said K.J.

Dominican project Tres balas (Three Bullets) has dominated the awards handed out by Open Doors, Locarno Pro’s talent development program for artists from underrepresented communities.

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent LOCARNO — Two movie projects which capture best the brewing revolution in Latin American filmmaking walked off with the biggest plaudits at this year’s Locarno Open Doors prize ceremony on Tuesday. Both underscore the mindset reset among cineasts – their questioning of received wisdom accompanied by the explosion in invention being brought to low-budget filmmaking in the region.

Naman Ramachandran Niv Art Movies, producer of Rotterdam winner “Sexy Durga,” and Little Lamb Films, the outfit behind Tallin, Santa Barbara and Edinburgh film “The Cloud and the Man,” have teamed for Locarno title “Whispers of Fire & Water.” An exclusive clip from the film has been provided to Variety. Lubdhak Chatterjee, who has previous shorts and documentaries to his credit, makes his fiction feature debut with the film. The narrative revolves around an audio installation artist who visits the coal mines of eastern India, an area plagued by depleting natural resources where fire burns constantly.

Naman Ramachandran Indian filmmaker Dominic Sangma’s “Rapture” (“Rimdogittanga”) is the second in a trilogy of films based on his memories of village life that began with his debut feature “Ma’ama” (2018). The Garo-language film, which revolves around a 10-year-old boy who suffers from night blindness and for whom every night is terrifying when his village is gripped by the fear of child-kidnappers, originated from another memory of Sangma, who hails from Meghalaya in northeastern India.

Climate change activists briefly halted the Locarno Film Festival’s honorary awards ceremony for environmentalist and documentarian Luc Jacquet on Monday evening.Jacquet, who won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2006 for The March Of The Penguins, was being feted with the Locarno Kids Award, followed by a screening of his new film Magnetic Continent in front of a 7,000-strong crowd on the festival’s landmark Piazza Grande.

Holly Jones With ruminating obscurity, the ambitious Negu Film Collective – which includes filmmakers Ekain Albite, Mikel Ibarguren, Nicolau Mallofré and Adrià Roca – works to explore the contradictions of a Basque conflict that weighs heavy on all that lived through it. Stakes, set in slow succession, portray reverberations of the era’s traumas.

Marta Balaga FilmSharks has picked up world sales rights to Finnish children’s film “Snot & Splash: The Mystery of Disappearing Holes.” “It was a bidding war. They got offers from everybody,” said FilmSharks CEO Guido Rud. “Snot & Splash” (“Räkä ja Roiskis”) is produced by It’s Alive Films – founded by director Teemu Nikki and Jani Pösö – and set for distribution in its native Finland (Scanbox), Scandinavian sub distribution by Sweden (Folkets Bio) and Norway (Norsk Filmdistribusjon), and Italy in the spring (I Wonder Pictures).

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor Celebrated Malaysian-Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang sat down with Variety on the eve of receiving the Locarno Film Festival Career Award. The award is only the latest in a series of prizes from major European festivals the art-house maverick has received – from the 1994 Golden Lion from Venice for “Vive L’Amour” to the Silver Bear that “The River” won in Berlin in 1997. So how does he feel to have received this latest sign of esteem from the film community? “This is very special for me,” Tsai says.

Momo Film Co, one of Singapore’s most prominent production-distribution outfits. Indeed, Yeo’s film feels uniquely Singaporean in its reflection of the complex psychic state of the country, which can teeter between a coastal dreamland and a cloistered urban nightmare. Before trying his hand at filmmaking, Yeo studied animation.

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor “The Vanishing Soldier” is a coming of age story, as breathless as its protagonist: the kind of film that will make cinephiles of seventeen-year-olds. Which is one of the reasons that Dani Rosenberg, the film’s 43-year-old director, is delighted to be in Locarno, where the film, sold by Intramovies, is screening in main competition, and has just got a trailer, and poster, shared in exclusivity with Variety. “We had options for other festivals,” Rosenberg told Variety at the Swiss fest.

Holly Jones Basil Da Cunha’s third feature, “Manga d’Terra,” bowed in Locarno’s main Competition on Friday, a strand that highlights contemporary cinema and innovative global debuts from established and emerging cineasts. His debut, “After the Night,” played the Cannes Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight in 2013, while his follow-up, “The End of the World,” screened in Locarno’s main competition in 2019.

Marta Balaga It was a good day for female filmmakers – and documentaries – at Locarno Pro, with “Mother Vera” by Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson winning the Creativity Media First Look Award on Sunday at Locarno’s pix-in-post competition, dedicated this year to the U.K. Dedicated to a young Orthodox nun, “Mother Vera” shows her turbulent past and fragile future as she faces inner conflict after 20 years as a monastic.

Belarusian-set pic Mother Vera has picked up Locarno’s Creativity Media First Look Award, the biggest prize handed out by the festival’s industry section.