Locarno Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival 2026
Why do we watch? I jotted down the question halfway through the first film I saw at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, Kevin B. Lee’s Afterlives (2025). It was my ninth trip to the Swiss Alps, and my first encounter with Lee’s feature debut, a desktop documentary that begins as a dissection of a propaganda movie produced by ISIS—Flames of War (2014)—and swells into a much larger rumination on our current media regime. Afterlives wants to interrogate the proliferation of images of violence across screens big and small, as well as how we consume those digital atrocities. It asks if one can watch without becoming complicit, doubling as a profound testament to the importance of film criticism: an attempt to excavate images and interrogate our relationship with them. By this logic, the act of viewing can never be neutral.
We watch because we have to, Lee suggests, because we want to understand. This is a good way of thinking about Wayne Wapeemukwa’s Manhunt(all titles 2026 unless otherwise noted), which is also concerned with the ever-porous divide between our everyday lives and the horrific imagery that saturates our screens. A Canadian filmmaker of Métis descent, Wapeemukwa has long focused on the country’s disenfranchised—his first feature, Luk’Luk’l (2017), dramatized the lives of people living on society’s fringes during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Loosely based on a nationwide search for two teenagers who murdered three people across British Columbia in the summer of 2019, Manhunt wants to probe the rationale for their crimes. But to understand isn’t to forgive, much less to celebrate their barbarities. Rife with horrors as his film may be, Wapeemukwa doesn’t sensationalize the events; if there’s anything Manhunt communicates throughout, it is a feeling of utter, inescapable loneliness.
Joey and Kit (Harris Lowe and Landon Tunold) are 18-year-old high school friends who share a passion for guns, shoot-’em-up video games, and a toxic mix of alienation and restlessness. Powered by an inchoate anger at their surroundings, they flee town aboard a battered van, destination unknown, a journey that accrues an ominous energy at each stop. If the naturalism of their dialogues evokes the Ross brothers’ Gasoline Rainbow (2023), Wapeemukwa’s visual experimentalism recalls Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD output. Like the former, Manhunt demonstrates an ethnographic interest for the milieu in which it is set. And like Korine’s most recent projects—Aggro Dr1ft (2023) and Baby Invasion (2024)—Wapeemukwa’s keeps toggling between the “real” world and the hyper-violent universe of the boys’ video games until the two realms effectively bleed into each other. The first-person shooters wind up shaping the film’s pace and look; Manhunt’s assaultive visuals and frenetic rhythms—shot by Jonathan Glendon and edited by Coline Debray, respectively—feel eerily attuned to our chronically online zeitgeist.
Brutality haunted another official competition entry out of Canada. The latest from Quebec native and Locarno regular Denis Côté, Nobody’s Violence concerns Mira (Larissa Corriveau), a solitary woman who roams the country administering a lethal brew to terminally ill patients who welcome her as a kind of savior. Not so their grieving relatives, but Côté does not judge his protagonist, nor does he give her much of a backstory. Throughout, Mira remains shrouded in mystery. We come to know that she works for some cult-like ring led by one Ludo (Philippe Rebbot), but who she was before they met, what her contract entails, and why she can’t seem to break it are questions Nobody’s Violence leaves refreshingly open. Côté likes to traffic in enigmas and ambiguities, but compared to his most elusive works, Nobody’s Violence is uncharacteristically legible. It’s not that the film is free of surreal detours—Mira’s path only grows stranger as it unravels—but her character arc comes across as a little too predictable. Hers is the story of an angel of death who slowly learns to embrace life, and the whole film seems subservient to her evolution—see the inclusion of a happy-go-lucky stranger-turned-lover, Pierric (Xavier Bergeron), more of a catalyst for Mira’s joie de vivre than a flesh-and-blood character. Still, formulaic as some of its beats might be, Nobody’s Violence finds ways to jam your bearings. Time feels out of joint, with seasons passing in the blink of an eye, while Vincent Biron’s 16mm cinematography, littered with flares and scratches, suggests material under pressure, breathing and crackling as you watch. Nobody’s Violence might well go down as one of Côté’s most funereal efforts, but the film’s frames—and the actress at its center—radiate an infectious exuberance.
Côté was not the only Big Name in attendance. Fellow Locarno habitué Albert Serra—winner of the 2013 Pardo d’Oro for Story of My Death—returned to the fest with Sixteen Moments of My Life, a documentary of a one-off performance by singer and actress Ingrid Caven at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. Despite its subject, as the director emphatically stressed at the premiere, this is not a “concert film.” Running just shy of 90 minutes, Sixteen Moments captures Caven—famed for her film roles in European productions from the 1960s and ’70s, including those directed by her late husband, Rainer Werner Fassbinder—as she croons the titular ballads, autobiographical anecdotes sung in a way that straddles opera, cabaret, and spoken-word poetry. Accompanying Caven on stage are Molforts, a Catalan electronic band led by Serra’s longtime composers, Marc Verdaguer and Joe Robinson. The director, working again with cinematographer Artur Tort, employs his signature multiple-camera setup to frame Caven et alii from a variety of angles. There’s something very unobtrusive about the approach. Save for the occasional zoom, Tort’s camerawork doesn’t draw attention to itself, nor does the music, a synths-heavy score that expands and contracts, accordion-like, adjusting to Caven’s husky, quavering vibrato.
I cannot think of many other working directors who’ve courted risk as assiduously as Serra. The indelible sequence that saw Benoît Magimel ride gigantic waves on a jet ski off the coast of Tahiti in Pacifiction (2022) incarnates all that makes his cinema so thrilling: the feeling of watching unique and irreproducible images, so alive they seem to ignite. So it is in Sixteen Moments. Centered as it is on a performance, the film is thematically contiguous to its immediate predecessor, Afternoons of Solitude (2024), another documentary, which chronicles the hair-rising feats of bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. Granted, the stakes this time might be lower, yet both works emanate a similar electricity. That’s because Caven’s performance is live, and as such open to the unforeseen and the unpredictable. There’s no way of controlling or directing it; the best Serra can hope for—and what Sixteen Moments accomplishes so entrancingly—is to capture it for the sake of posterity. That the film wouldn’t feel out of place as an installation isn’t an indictment so much as a commentary on the role that Locarno should continue to play against glitzier, more commercially-minded fests like Venice and Cannes: to provide a haven for idiosyncratic works from directors eager to test the medium’s limits.
No official competition entry this year did that more convincingly than Lê Bảo’s Hearing. A follow-up to the Berlinale-prizewinning Taste (2021), the director’s sophomore favors feeling over logic. Prosaic plot specifics are secondary to what Lê and returning cinematographer Nguyen Vinh Phuc are after: creating unfading images seemingly dredged up from a dream. The story—about a divorced father of two who makes ends meet by installing decibel meters in and around Saigon that flash blue when a certain volume is reached—incites a daisy chain of oneiric sequences. We watch the man install his contraption to ward off rival gangs of monkeys deep in the jungle; father and kids feeding boiled eggs and milk to some disheveled figures stranded far from the city; coin-shaped shards of light traveling on the children’s faces as they roam the forest. Hearing is significantly more ambitious and expansive than its forebear. Where Taste was set almost exclusively inside a maze of dank, caliginous rooms populated by specters, this one keeps seesawing between day and night, city and country, interiors and exteriors. And yet, their titles notwithstanding, both films are designed to stimulate all the senses. If Vincent Villa’s sound design evinces an ASMR-level devotion to the most quotidian noises (bubble wrap popping, milk poured into a bottle, an eggshell peeled and crunched), Lê seems just as intrigued by shots of people eating, smelling, rubbing their hands over grass or dew-coated rocks.
That multisensorial approach is what sets his cinema apart from recent Vietnamese standouts like Phạm Thiên Ân’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell(2023) and Trương Minh Quý’s Viet and Nam (2024)—curiously, all three share the same producers. Lê isn’t as interested as Trương in drawing political critiques from his material, nor does he deal in the same spiritualism that pervades Phạm’s feature debut. His focus rests squarely on the human body, on the limits and possibilities of our senses, and on inducing a curious dislocation. The film’s sprawl follows no cause-effect logic (how do you account for the sight of a giant, turtle-like creature swimming a river upstream toward the end—a scene, like so many others in this slippery film, unconnected to anything that comes before or after it?). And though that can make it an alienating watch, there is something nonetheless electrifying about Lê’s commitment to entrance and confound.
The only other film I saw capable of triggering such disorientation was an undisputed highlight from Filmmakers of the Present, a sidebar devoted to first and second features from emerging directors. That’s perhaps an ill-fitting label for Beatrice Gibson, a British artist-cum-cineaste who’s been making prize-winning shorts for over 20 years—two of which earned her the Tiger Award for Best Short in Rotterdam (A Necessary Music in 2009 and The Tiger’s Mind in 2013)—and collaborated with such directors as Sean Price Williams and Ben Rivers, whom she recruited as cinematographer for this feature debut. In line with her shorts, At Night eschews traditional narratives for something far more sinuous; not unlike I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead(2018), in which words from poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles echo over images of street riots, poetry shapes the fabric of the film. The opening quote from Alice Notley (“I am a tone of voice, warming, shifting, pausing, changing, including, asserting, exulting, including, turning and including”) is as much a manifesto for the late poet’s craft as it is for the director’s. Like Notley, who viewed poetry as a permeable realm into which different voices could coalesce, Gibson treats cinema as a polyphonic world, a medium that brings together not just disparate art forms, but disparate people: all her films are odes to the sanctity of communal work and friendship.
In At Night, Gibson trains her gaze on a handful of women who cross paths over the course of a single evening in the neon-soaked outskirts of Paris. Some of them share a history: Gibson herself stars as a filmmaker who, in the process of scouting locations, tracks down a woman with whom she worked on an earlier project, Didi (Diocouda Diaoune). But for the most part, At Night invokes a state of serendipity, in which strangers intersect each other’s orbits by sheer chance, and the film exists as a record of their fleeting encounters: a game of pool at a Chinese eatery, a sprawling symposium on sex and desire at a café, a concert Didi attends after befriending the singer. “City symphony” is an oft-abused label, but here’s a work that earns it, in which characters’ voices mix with Notley’s—halfway through, there’s a recording of the poet reading from her 1992 epic, The Descent of Alette—and the city’s own. We hear the streets’ restless humming, the clangorous chugging of metro cars underground, but also whispers, birdsongs—all the myriad textures that, in Gibson’s hands, turn some unassuming corners of Paris into sources of endless wonders.
As Locarno’s preeminent launchpad for daring cinema, Filmmakers of the Present has recently unveiled some astonishing standouts (among them Courtney Stephens’s Invention, 2024, and Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron, 2025), so I’m not surprised the sidebar featured the best film I saw at the festival: Alessandra Sanguinetti’s The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer. For 25 years, renowned Magnum photographer Sanguinetti documented the lives of cousins Guillermina “Guile” Aranciaga and Belinda “Beli” Stutz. She began in 1999—when the girls were 10-year-olds itching to trade the Argentine Pampas for a more glamorous life in Buenos Aires—and wrapped in the 2020s, the sisters now in their thirties and still stranded in the country’s barren interior, having forsaken their childhood aspirations to become mothers and start families of their own. You could think of Everlasting Summer as a story about abandoned dreams, about the ways in which time inevitably erodes one’s ambitions. But that would mean grafting too lugubrious a reading onto a film that, even as its protagonists grow older, sustains their youthful spirit and awe.
