ALFONSO CUARÓN
“When I do a film, it’s pure instinct”
Alfonso Cuarón’s Philosophy of Film Anger into Beauty: Mohammad Rasoulof Andrew Norman Wilson on the Art of Survival
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ESTABLISHING SHOTS
Giona A. Nazzaro ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Si può amare il cinema e non essere amanti del melodramma? La risposta, ovviamente, è no, non si può. Il melodramma si nutre di passioni essenziali e pone una fiducia assoluta nella dignità dell’essere umano. L’amore, la fede, la lealtà e, naturalmente, i loro opposti, il tradimento e la malvagità, sono gli ingredienti essenziali di ogni storia mai raccontata. D.W. Griffith aveva appreso da Charles Dickens la dinamica fondamentale della narrazione, trasmettendola a John Ford, considerato dai suoi detrattori un cineasta “sentimentale”. Il melodramma è il paradigma di tutti i racconti cinematografici, una sorta di linguaggio universale. Dalla sceneggiata napoletana, dove brani musicali s’intrecciano a storie da romanzo d’appendice (iss’, ess’, e o malament’, ossia lui, lei e il cattivo…) al cinema di Hong Kong dei tardi anni Settanta e di tutto il
decennio successivo, il salto può sembrare azzardato solo se si considera il passaggio con superficialità. Il neo noir di Hong Kong, che qualcosa deve anche a un regista “minore” come Alfonso Brescia, con le sue sparatorie furibonde e le sue agnizioni, monumentali tradimenti e gag dall’umorismo cosiddetto “facile” (si pensi a Wong Jing), cinema di emozioni primarie, si offre come la matrice primaria di tante fantasie bollywodiane. L’amore per un gigante come Shah Rukh Khan è intrecciato strettamente alle ragioni del melodramma, che da Napoli a Hong Kong a Los Angeles e Mumbai si offre come la lingua universale delle ragioni del cuore e di tutte le sue utopie.
Buon cinema, ci si vede in Piazza Grande!
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Christopher Small
LEAD EDITOR: Leonardo Goi
DEPUTY EDITORS: Hugo Emmerzael, Maria Giovanna Vagenas, Keva York
STAFF WRITERS: Laurine Chiarini, Savina Petkova
CONTRIBUTORS: Ena Alvarado, Cyril Cordoba, Stefan Ivančić, Pierre Jendrysiak, Giovanni Marchini Camia, Daniela Persico, Julia Schubiger
TRANSLATORS: Tessa Cattaneo, Anna Rusconi
BRAND, EDITORIAL & MEDIA: Oliver Osborne
DESIGN: Joshua Althaus, Nadine Curanz, Alex Furgiuele
PHOTOGRAPHERS: Elia Bianchi, Julie Mucchiut, Ti-Press, PHOTO INTERN: Indra Crittin
COVER PHOTO: Davide Padovan
PARTNERSHIPS: Marco Cantergiani, Laura Heggemann, Nicolò Martire, Fabienne Merlet
CROSSWORD DESIGNER: Nicholas Henriquez
HIGHLIGHTS
PIAZZA GRANDE
21:30 THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG by Mohammad Rasoulof
167’ | o.v. Persian | s.t. English, German
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI by Orson Welles
87’
Italian, French | s.t. French, Italian, English
16:30 Palexpo (FEVI)
MOND by Kurdwin Ayub
92’ | o.v. English, Arabic, German | s.t. English, French, Italian
CONCORSO CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE
11:00 PalaCinema 2 LES ENFANTS ROUGES by Lotfi Achour 100’ | o.v. Arabic | s.t. English
11:30 PalaCinema 1 INVENTION by Courtney Stephens 72’ | o.v. English | s.t. French, Italian
18:00 PalaCinema 1
HOLY ELECTRICITY by Tato Kotetishvili 95’ | o.v. Georgian | s.t. English, French
RETROSPETTIVA
11:30 GranRex GUNMAN’S WALK by Phil Karlson 97’ | o.v. English
14:00 GranRex THE WALKING HILLS by John Sturges 78’ | o.v. English
FUORI CONCORSO 17:30 La Sala MA FAMILLE CHÉRIE by Isild Le Besco 83’ | o.v. French, English, Italian | s.t. English, French
13:00 Forum @Spazio Cinema CONVERSATION WITH ALFONSO CUARÓN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
17:00 GranRex CONVERSATION WITH SHAH RUKH KHAN PARDO ALLA CARRIERA ASCONA-LOCARNO TOURISM
22:00 GranRex DEVDAS by Sanjay Leela Bhansali 185’ | o.v. Hindi | s.t. English HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA PARDO ALLA CARRIERA ASCONA-LOCARNO TOURISM SHAH RUKH KHAN
From above: Irène Jacob walks the red carpet to pick up her Locarno77 Leopard Club Award. Radu
Alfonso Cuarón: Filmmaking as an Instinctive Process
Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at Locarno77, the Mexican auteur talks to Pardo about how his films can be seen as an extension of his life.
By Hugo Emmerzael
The five-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón hasn’t made a lot of films, but every single one of them is a testament not just to his skill as a filmmaker but also to his deep passion for cinema. Be it an intimate drama, a dystopian thriller, or a cosmic journey through space, Cuarón’s visually spectacular films always boil down to one very important question: what does it mean to be human?
Hugo Emmerzael: To start on a personal note: it’s been a while since Roma(2018) was released. As a film particularly close to your heart, and with plenty of autobiographical elements, I was wondering how it resides in your memory now, seven years after the shoot?
Alfonso Cuarón: Yeah, actually, it feels pretty much in the past already, like I’m looking at it. I can see it from very far away, you know? When I was doing that film, I wasn’t even consciously aware that I was involved in such a personal project. I knew the film took place around my life, but I guess I figured it was not specifically about me. Nevertheless, making it did feel like traveling through time. Revisiting those moments had a kind of therapeutic effect on me, with all the benefits and pain that comes with that. However, it’s been a while, and I don’t think so much about my past films. I like to move on to different ventures right after they’re finished.
HE: These personal flourishes are part of what make your films stand out, even the ones adapted from other stories and books. It reminds me of the opening of your Great Expectations (1998), in which the protagonist says: “I’m not going to tell the story how it happened, I’m going to tell it the way I remembered it.” Would you say that this sensibility is what you specifically bring to your projects?
AC: The person who probably made me aware of this is my brother Carlos [CuarÓn], with whom I wrote a couple of my films. He said that each of my films is like a mirror of a specific period of my life. However, when I set out to do a film, it’s pure instinct. All of it is an instinctive process. So, I’m not stopping to overthink things. I’m just trying to put them together and to realize the film I have slowly built in my head. And still, I think it’s inevitable for any artist that whatever you do becomes a projection of your personal experiences. In some cases, this happens in a profound way, in others, in much more frivolous ways.
HE: Speaking about your films mirroring the times you lived in, can you talk a bit about your first short film Quartetfor the End of Time (Cuarteto para el fin del tiempo), which you finished in 1983. It’s a very interesting and strange piece of existential filmmaking. Can you bring us back to those days?
AC: I was at film school and experienced a certain feeling of isolation. I was very young. I might have finished the film in 1983, but I probably shot it in 1981, or even before, when I was about 19 or 20. So, this huge feeling of alienation and isolation was very present in my life at that time. I used to hang out with a friend who had this tiny apartment in this very beautiful building in Mexico City. Somehow, spending time in that place, the story just came together. Part of it was scripted, but I was also making up a lot as we went along. Around that time, I was intrigued by a film called The Man Who Sleeps (Un homme qui dort, 1974) by Bernard Queysanne with a screenplay by Georges Perec. That film just follows a man in his loneliness, showing his feeling of disconnection. What I remember of my shoot is how I was trying to surrender myself to that space, and working with this non-actor [Angel Torralba], making up scenes as I was going through it. I was very disorganized when I was shooting it, because I really didn’t know the right system of how to put a film together and how to organize my shots. During the editing, I couldn’t find my way through the material; one of my teachers intervened to help me, because he said there was, indeed, very good stuff there. He took a couple of scenes, put them together, and showed me how they worked alongside each other. Then I started my editing from there, and that’s the result you see now.
HE: The reason I also ask about this existential film is because I know you studied philosophy before you studied film.
AC: Actually, I was studying philosophy at the same time. I used to study philosophy in the morning and then film in the afternoon.
HE: I think you can see that background in your oeuvre, especially the existential sides of many of the characters in your films. I could easily draw a line between the lonesome protagonist of Quartetforthe End of Time and Sandra Bullock’s character floating through space in Gravity (2013). Would you say this philosophical background has informed the choices you make as a filmmaker?
AC: It definitely has. In many ways, philosophy probably played a bigger part in my life than film studies did. It informed me much more and it keeps on informing me throughout my career and my regular life even. You know, I was never an academic, never a real expert in anything. But it keeps informing me and it is something that keeps me current, in sync with the times, and able to explore new ideas.
HE: It also informs how you approach your characters, who are often so idiosyncratic and inconsistent, and messy in all the ways that life can be. Even amidst the technological spectacle of Gravity, you put the humanity of it all at the forefront.
AC: As we know, humanity is a messy thing. It’s unreliable and at the same time incredible. It can be filled with a strong spirit of solidarity, it can be very funny, and it can be very tragic. That’s all part of the realm of humanity, and I think that, in one way or the other, all of us have those traits inside of us. This complexity is what makes humanity itself very poignant. This is why I’m a bit concerned about romanticizing people. When you talk about people you admire – let’s say from history, or the arts, or maybe just members of your own family – and you romanticize them, you put them on a pedestal. What you then take away from them, stealing from them even, is the most interesting part of them, which is their complexity. And again, I find it all very compelling. I think that each member of this human community is just trying to deal with their own loneliness, trying to make the best out of it. At the end, maybe love is the only solace that we have for that immense loneliness that we’re put on this world with.
HE: So, basically isolation and love would be the two things that connect most of your films in some way.
AC: Man, you’re a shrink...
HE: That’s my work. I’m a film critic.
AC: Very funny.
HE: I think that ChildrenofMen (2006) is still one of the most important dystopian films of the 21st century, because it gave us very concrete images that captured these feelings of dread and anxiety that a lot of people experience in life, especially when they ponder the worrisome future of the world. Can you talk about the primacy of these images and the way they communicate those deeper feelings?
AC: This is part of the very reason I love cinema. It’s clear that you can make a film without music, without color, without sound, without actors, without story even. However, you cannot make a film without a camera and without editing. Even the earliest films by the Lumière brothers have a single edit, because the shot has a beginning and an end. So, I believe in cinema as a visual medium that is aided by different tools, including sound. But I think the language of film itself is based on how the images flow in time. What you can convey in those images, and how those images carry expression, is what I’m always attracted to. This is why I stay away from too much exposition and didacticism. I don’t want to explain; I want you to experience.
HE: You have a very close working relationship with renowned cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. If we take Children of Men as an example, what kind of discussions did you have with him about how these images carry these kinds of expressions you just mentioned? Do you find an overarching philosophy in your cinematography, or do most of these visual choices stem from the intuitive approach between the two of you?
AC: Well, the seed of everything is very intuitive. We have worked for so long together that we have developed similar approaches. Our views on life and our particular tastes are, generally speaking, also very in sync. When we worked together on Y tu mamá también (2001), I wanted us to start from scratch and do the film we would have done before we went to film school. It was as if we wanted to unlearn how to make films, putting together our own new rules. I decided that we should go with these very wide-angle lenses, so that information in the background would be just as relevant and important as the information in the foreground. Sometimes the background carries even more importance than the foreground in that film. Then, when we started with Children of Men, we decided that we wanted to take a similar approach. We wanted to follow each shot to its ultimate conclusion, getting the most out of each of them that we possibly could. Even the more classical coverage shots [in that film] have this quality, in the way that they relate to the shots around them in the editing. We also said while we were prepping the whole thing that every shot and every frame in it should be a comment on the human condition. We were not trying to do a science fiction film, we were trying to actually reference the present. When we started conceptualizing the film – it was around 1999 and the transition to 2000 – I wanted to understand the key issues that would shape the century to come, especially since I was very concerned about the stuff I was reading and observing.
HE: I read in an interview you did for the Guardian that Roma was one of the first films you made where you felt you were working without any external influences. It can be quite hard to protect this core part of your own artistry and sensibility, especially in mainstream filmmaking, so what does it mean for you to try to be this authentic filmmaker, as close as possible to yourself?
AC: I don’t think about my authenticity as a filmmaker that much, maybe because I’m not that prolific in my work. My films take a long time to make, because of the efforts that I put into the shooting, and the time I take for the post-production and editing. Quite often, I might have an idea for a film that I get excited about, or I’m offered some screenplays that sound like a lot of fun, but then I think about it like this: somebody is probably also going to do a good, maybe even better, job with this project. Then I tend to think about how long it would take for me to finish this new film. With my current rate of making films, I honestly don’t have that many more in me. So, I decided, if I’m going to do something, it should be something that wouldn’t be able to exist without me. That’s pretty much been my rule of thumb for a while now. So, I look for the things that aren’t going to exist without me.
HE: Besides receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at Locarno this year, you will also present a restoration of Alain Tanner’s Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (JonahWhoWill Be 25 in the Year 2000, 1976). What does that film mean to you?
AC: Alain Tanner is one of those amazing filmmakers who has almost disappeared from the cinephile consciousness. I hope that with the new restoration of that film, people will become more aware of what beautiful films he made.
HE: I see very strong connections between this film and your work, especially in those idiosyncrasies of the characters that we discussed earlier.
AC: The complexity of the characters in his films is immense. It’s all about the contradictions of people, about the way they say one thing and act in another manner. This contradiction between the selfishness of each character versus their attempts to create an ideal society is beautiful. I love how there’s an almost enlightened pessimism to it all. We were also talking about my cinematography earlier, and it’s very interesting to see what Tanner does with every single shot. This particular film looks deceptively simple, but you can see that each shot is in fact highly elaborate. There’s a lot of humor in the film too, but at the same time a lot of disappointment. I just find it an amazing commentary on humanity, and also our society in general.
◼ The Public Conversation with Alfonso Cuarón is held today, 11.8 at 13:00 at Forum @Spazio Cinema (free admission)
◼ Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 screens today, 11.8 at 15:00 at PalaCinema 1
◼ Children of Men screens tomorrow, 12.8 at 10:30 at GranRex
I think the language of film itself is based on how the images flow in time. What you can convey in those images, and how those images carry expression, is what I’m always attracted to.
OUT OF THE STUDIO, INTO THE WORLD A Conversation with Andrew Norman Wilson
In a wide-ranging conversation, Pardo spoke to the American artist turned filmmaker Andrew Norman Wilson – who’s at Locarno77 as part of both the Filmmakers Academy and BaseCamp – about his career pivot, as narrativized in a recent and deeply resonant essay for The Baffler, and his Switzerland-set debut feature Interlaken, currently in pre-production.
by Keva York
While precarity is becoming endemic to more and more kinds of labor (and sectors of our lives), it has long been entrenched in creative labor – an arena in which it’s also liable to produce especially surreal living situations. The dizzying combination of personal poverty and proximity to wealth and prestige that characterizes many an artist’s life is a large part of what makes Andrew Norman Wilson’s piece for The Baffler, “It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now”, so darkly entertaining. It’s also a large part of the reason why Wilson – whose video work can be found in the collections of the MoMA, the Whitney, and the Centre Pompidou, amongst others – decided to leave the art world in which he’s been immersed for over a decade and try his luck in the world of film instead.
Ahead of his first visit to Locarno, I pressed Wilson about his views on the state of the film industry and why making fictions puts you in touch with reality.
Keva York: Your piece for TheBaffleris in effect a resignation from the art world and a declaration of your move into film. So, the question I feel it begs on some level then is: what’s the difference between being an artist and being a filmmaker?
Andrew Norman Wilson: I should specify that there are different kinds of artists, and different kinds of filmmakers. It’s way easier to make money as the kind of filmmaker I’m becoming than as a video artist. It’s a less impoverished endeavor. And a less lonely endeavor – I think that through film, through the process of creating an imitation of life, I’m able to access more of what life has to offer. I mention in The Baffler piece that for Impersonator (2021), which was my first live-action narrative short, I did a lot of research at police stations. And then when it came to the shoot, because we were representing cops on screen, we were required to hire actual cops to make sure the fake cops weren’t behaving like real ones. We also rented an LAPD police SUV, and they had to monitor the usage of that. So there were these cops hanging around on set that I got to know. I actually hung out with one of them a bit after shooting the film, just because he was a funny, fascinating guy.
On the [political] left, there’s this reduction of any cops to the status of non-personhood, but I’m much more interested in the approach that a filmmaker like [Jean-Pierre] Melville took: he thought any potential relationship he could have with anyone, anywhere on the political spectrum, could be useful for his art. While other Parisian filmmakers on the left in the ’60s were bitching in cafes, he was actually getting to know fascists and police officers – and I think that’s why his films are so singular.
So there are major differences, and they’re material, but they’re also creative and social. As a filmmaker I feel like I’m more able to be a part of society as opposed to deluding myself into thinking that I occupy a position in some romanticized outside.
KY: I think it’s true that, of the various art forms, film is uniquely tethered to the world, at least any film shot with a camera. But I also think that it’s maybe less true of films beyond a certain budget – making a bigger film tends to mean you’re not going out into the world so much, but instead recreating one in a studio.
ANW: I still think that’s real, you know? I just shot a big budget fashion campaign – something I wouldn’t have been able to do if I’d just stayed in my position as a marginalized artist. It was in a big studio with a crew of maybe 50 people from different parts of New York, London, Switzerland, and more. There’s this idea of the “non-place” that Mark Augé wrote about and I’ve always thought that idea was really bullshit. He described airports as non-places, as though they’re just these abstract sites for flows of capital and cosmopolitans where no organic social life is possible. But real people actually have to wake up at 4:30 a.m. and take the train to the airport to work for TSA and Sunglass Hut; those people form relationships through those jobs that are informed both by where they came from and the airport as a local, material entity. A big film set is no different; it isn’t cut off from the world at all. The “composed films” of Powell and Pressburger illuminate this: they present us with both immaculate production design and a reflection of those material systems of artifice within the studio. I’m thinking of the light gels that fall into the frame like leaves during the performance in The Red Shoes (1948)...
On the consumer end, with a big studio film it’s still possible to have the world’s eyes on the product, whereas next to no one knows about what I’ve done as an artist. I’m not saying Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) is the kind of film I want to make (or even see), but it’s preposterous to say that it’s not out there in the world, touching people’s lives.
KY: A film set exists in the real world, for sure. Nevertheless, isn’t that set “real” in largely the same way as an art opening? Which is to say, it’s still a bubble; it doesn’t really put you into contact with the range of people that made it exciting for you to work on Impersonator, say.
ANW: No, the film sets I’ve been on contain more of the world. The hierarchies of the capitalist economy are on display, and on average I’d say a wider spectrum of human identity is involved than you’ll find at an art opening. And when I think of the production of a contemporary artist, I think of an individual, maybe a few assistants if they’re lucky, emailing and clicking around in Adobe Creative Suite in a bare white room on the outskirts of a city. A lot of the art that I’m drawn to is born out of that kind of solitary production mode as opposed to the kinds of artists who function like creative directors or brand managers. Most of those artists aren’t even making art, they’re just creating replacement objects/images for theoretical/political/identity stances. I think the sculptor Vincent Fecteau is one of the best artists working today, and he’s mostly just making these inscrutable papier-mâché forms alone in his studio. I think he gets a lot of pleasure out of working that way, but that’s not the life I want to live. What I find grounding about working in film, or at least my situation, is the community, which I found difficult to access as an atomized creator on a circuit of biennials and art fairs. I’ve made six music videos with the same producer, which entails working with a lot of the same crew, and we hang out socially. I’ve only left the state of New York once this year – which is crazy, considering that I used to be on the road four months per year, often touching down in five countries during that span. But I’ve been able to do projects that are mostly based in New York and that actually pay me. I’m playing on a softball team; I was recently in a relationship – these things that in the past were structurally impossible to commit to. There are certainly day jobs that would be even more grounding, but for now I’m making things work in New York in a way that I’ve never been able to as an artist.
KY: Yeah, I guess the idea of film being a collaborative art form has become essentially a truism, but it has renewed weight when thinking about these other, necessarily isolated models of creative production. But I’d like to go back to the idea you mentioned of the general public having a relationship to cinema and not video art – because the status of film is changing, no? Increasingly the industry is geared towards making just a few tentpole productions, like Deadpool&Wolverine, most of which seem to disappear pretty quickly, and lots of very small productions, which only a very select group of people will see and even fewer will care about. It feels like film is itself becoming a sort of rarefied interest. How do you feel about its place in our post-monoculture era?
ANW: I do have a bit of hope right now. The industry is explicitly acknowledging that it’s in crisis. There isn’t really a distribution model that’s working. Say what you will about Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Poor Things (2023) – but what’s interesting about the Academy’s acceptance of those films is the effect they’ll have in the years moving forward. I think producers and financiers have to take bigger risks on novel approaches to feature filmmaking. The film I’m making here in Switzerland next year is about a character who arrives and treats the country as a social media pop-up, and they use this video sharing app that, unlike TikTok, is viewed landscape, and doesn’t have a bunch of buttons cluttering the interface – in order to create a more cinematic video app experience. I’m interested in that as content within the film, but it’s also a way for me to smuggle video art into a conventional three-act structure.
But I haven’t become precious about the feature film form; it’s not my sole pursuit moving forward. I’m interested in working on a spectrum of everything from video art to a mid-budget action heist film – which is another script I’ve written [based on Impersonator]. The problem we’re facing is obviously that we have these little screens in front of us, and those are like kryptonite for film consumption in a theater. I don’t know what to do about that, and I don’t know if doubling down on feature filmmaking is my particular solution – Conner O’Malley’s career is interesting to me, for instance. He’s on TV and in “indie” films, but then he’s also using his income to pay his friends to help him create incredibly profound work that is then released on Youtube. It’s not opportunistic content for the algorithm – in fact, it’s often very directly criticizing those logics. The Mask (2023) is far better than anything I saw at the Whitney Biennial or in the shorts programs at last year’s New York Film Festival. So, I do have a little bit of hope right now, given how confused the people at the top of media corporations are and the human ingenuity that I’m seeing every day through all these different formats.
KY: You mentioned that you’ll be shooting your first feature here in Switzerland [Interlaken]. Can you tell me about your relationship to the country?
ANW: Yes – I’ve been fascinated with Swiss culture ever since traveling here for the first time in 2015, but the project began when I did a residency at La Becque in 2020. One day I went to these two theme parks: one is JungfrauPark, which was initiated by this pseudoscientist and sci-fi author, Erich von Däniken – he wrote a book called Chariots of the Gods (1968), which presents the hypothesis that the technologies and religions of many ancient civilizations were given to them by ancient astronauts who were welcomed as gods. In 2003, von Däniken opened this EPCOT Center-scaled theme park devoted to his idea that “ancient aliens” are responsible for the Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples, and other wonders of the world. And then across the lake from JungfrauPark is a UNESCO World Heritage site called Ballenberg, which is an open-air museum that displays traditional buildings and architecture from all over the country. And I thought – these are two characters, one a QAnon type, the other, a tradcath. A few Alps over from Interlaken there’s an upscale resort town called Gstaad, and that birthed a third character – an American trust fund failson whose family has a chalet there. Due to the romance of the surroundings, a love triangle emerged between these three characters. I want this film to revel in the fairy tale-like image of the Bernese Oberland that has been bolstered by tourism and Bollywood films, but also to force that snow globe to crack, leak, and potentially shatter.
Making a first feature in the United States seems like a total nightmare right now – whereas through the Swiss majority crew I’ve assembled with a Swiss producer, I can receive governmental support. I’m still able to bring some American crew as well: [cinematographer] Sean Price Williams, [composer] Daniel Lopatin [aka Oneohtrix Point Never], [SFX artist] Emily Schubert. It’s also way cheaper to make a film in Interlaken than it is in New York, despite how expensive Switzerland can be. It mostly comes down to the fact that a lot of business and public sector entities aren’t charging film productions prohibitively expensive rates. It can cost $25,000 to close down a road in New York, whereas I think the maximum in Switzerland is $350.
Oddly, during my stay in Switzerland, my mother did 23andMe [a DNA testing company] and discovered that we were actually way more German and Swiss than we had thought. Maybe that partially explains why I’m drawn to the country, too – it’s in my DNA. Being both on the inside and the outside looking in, as an American, will allow me to depict that world in a way that I haven’t yet seen in cinema.
Andrew Norman Wilson’s performance
“It’s Not What the World Needs Right Now” will take place on Sunday, 11.8 at 19:30 at BaseCamp
1. Still from Hirngespenster exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2019)
2. Still from Ode to Seekers (2016) ©Andrew Norman Wilson
Still from In the Air Tonight (2020) ©Andrew Norman Wilson
Still from Impersonator (2021) ©Andrew Norman Wilson
la cultura in prima fila
Emozioni uniche al Locarno Film Festival con la Posta.
A Conversation with Irène Jacob
Dopo avere ricevuto ieri sera in Piazza Grande il Leopard Club Award Locarno77 nel corso di una cerimonia piena di gioia e di commozione, Irène Jacob, splendente e ruggente - è salita infatti sul palco imitando scherzosamente il ruggito del Leopardo - ha conversato oggi nel Forum @Spazio Cinema con Julie Savarie, condividendo con il pubblico del Festival, accorso numerosissimo all’evento, i suoi pensieri, i suoi ricordi e tutta l’esperienza del suo splendido percorso artistico. Riferendosi al premio ricevuto ha detto: «C’è qualcosa di molto bello nell’identificare il cinema con questo leopardo libero e selvaggio! Per me questo premio incoraggia un percorso, un viaggio, e mi fa pensare al tempo, ovviamente. Quando sei una giovane attrice speri di fare questo mestiere il più a lungo possibile, ed è questa forse la cosa più difficile alla fine: saper trasformarsi e rinnovarsi nel corso degli anni.» Parlando del suo mestiere ha poi aggiunto: «Quando sei un attore, il tuo lavoro è quello di percepire il mondo e di percepire ciò che stai vivendo con tutti i tuoi sensi. Ma per-
A Columbia Pictures retrospective is the best opportunity to show Gunman’s Walk (1958). Where else could you do it? You could show The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) in a John Ford retrospective; you could show The Big Heat (1953) in a program dedicated to film noirs; Bitter Victory (1957) simply because it is one of the most beautiful films ever made; but when and where would you show a film like Gunman’s Walk?
This Western by Phil Karlson is Hollywood at its worst: heavy-handed symbolism, big themes reduced to a few contradictory lines, a kitsch spectacle of pseudo-horse-riding and people shooting at bottles. Seen as a political text, it’s a bit too obvious; seen as an adventure film, it’s a bit too boring; as a philosophical or moral tale, a bit too simple. Gunman’s Walk got the greasiness of the late ’50s Western and the stiff, tanned ugliness of CinemaScope (people always talk about how CinemaScope flattens perspective and proportions, but never about how it flattens colors).
But the film is also Hollywood at its best: mythological figures fighting in an abstract war, a remarkably straightforward plot. It is, in a way, a film too big for itself, its own script, its own logic – less than 100 minutes to cover the foundation of the United States, the matter of the law, the severity of perjury, the horrors of racism, all folded into an old and tragic tale. It’s two brothers – played by James Darren and Tab Hunter – fighting for the love of their father – played by Van Heflin. Any of these themes could have been ground for a John Ford epic (or, even better, a John
cepire il mondo non basta, bisogna anche guardarlo, ed è proprio questo che è straordinario nel cinema: si ha bisogno di uno sguardo, dello sguardo degli altri, ma c’è modo e modo di guardare. Un regista è qualcuno che guarda il mondo in un certo modo, ed ogni regista guarda il mondo in una maniera unica ed inconfondibile.» Riferendosi infine a Trois couleurs : Rouge di Krzysztof Kieślowski, che presenterà al GranRex nel pomeriggio, Irène Jacob ha concluso: «Il Festival di Locarno sa dare spazio al giovane cinema di domani, ma sa anche ricordare la « giovinezza » dei film del passato. Quando un film è giovane, lo è per l’eternità, perché è inventivo, creativo. Krzysztof Kieślowski ma anche Louis Malle, Michelangelo Antonioni, Angelopoulos e Rivette - tutti questi registi con i quali ho lavorato, hanno cercato di creare un nuovo linguaggio cinematografico. Un cinema giovane è un cinema vivo, un cinema che sa rinnovarsi, che sa osare, libero da dettami e criteri commerciali.»
CRITICS ACADEMY x RETROSPETTIVA
GUNMAN’S WALK
By Pierre Jendrysiak
Ford B-movie), but combined, it is simply too much – especially for a Western made in an already troubled Hollywood by a director who was nothing more (and nothing less) than a good craftsman. But then, that’s the magic of those Hollywood ways – this heaviness, this bloat, allows for a certain beauty: the ideas surpass the form, and the form is haunted by the ideas – something enabled by Karlson’s simple craftmanship.
There is, oddly, no pressing discourse, no useless messaging in his directing: Karlson clearly sees the overarching seriousness (and straightforwardness) of the script and shows it for what it is, mostly managing to avoid caricature (save for a ridiculous shot of Hunter as the hot-tempered elder brother shooting at a painting of a cow). Everything that could pass for inconsistency becomes, therefore, a mark of ambiguity, a troubling aspect; the heaviness of some lines (“Not me, the law!” says the sheriff before arresting the wayward brother) is diluted in the simplicity of the film itself.
Unsurprisingly, Gunman’s Walk is never more interesting than when a character is shown with a gun in his hand, and the shooting scenes, as simple as they are, are very beautifully constructed and shot. Yet the film is actually about putting away those weapons at a time when “social peace” had taken root in American soil (though it remains a gun-friendly affair, as characters keep talking about firearms, belts, ammo – even the doctor shows off the bullets that he extracted from bodies). It feels like Karlson knew his film had to be more than a mere po-
lemic, and he tried to save it as much as he could by putting action into it, no matter how paradoxical those scenes. After all, Gunman’s Walk is a film about theory burying practice, about state violence covering that of the individual, about the written law replacing the laws of the West. And so Karlson shows it both ways – he shows a gun and then an open hand, an action then a word; the father must kill a son so he can accept the other (and his “impure” marriage to a half-French, half-Sioux woman).
The overwritten dialogue, the metaphorical figures of speech, could have made Gunman’s Walk a boring treatise, something like the other good-spirited (and pretentious) late Westerns that star Van Heflin, like Shane (1953) or 3:10 to Yuma (1957); In Karlson’s hands, it is nothing but a film, as well-crafted as it is forgettable. As such, it exemplifies the kind of effortlessly beautiful films Columbia Pictures, or any of these production companies funded, made, and released, week after week, 60 years ago.
PIERRE JENDRYSIAK is a participant in the Locarno Critics Academy, the Festival’s workshop that prepares emerging critics for the world of film festivals and professional writing about cinema.
◼ Gunman’sWalk screens today, 11.8 at 11:30 at the GranRex
© Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press
“HO SEMPRE CERCATO DI TRASFORMARE
LA RABBIA IN BELLEZZA”
Mohammad Rasoulof racconta di
TheSeedoftheSacredFig
e della vita dopo la fuga dall’Iran
di Hugo Emmerzael
Due decenni dopo aver proiettato il suo lungometraggio d’esordio The Twilight (Gagooman, 2002) a Locarno, il celebre regista iraniano Mohammad Rasoulof ritorna al Festival per presentare in Piazza Grande il suo nuovo film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Il cineasta dissidente ha recentemente deciso di fuggire dal suo Paese natale, l’Iran, per evitare una condanna a otto anni di reclusione per “’intenzione di commettere un crimine contro la sicurezza nazionale”. Quest’ardua decisione costituisce solo l’ultimo capitolo della complessa e tempestosa relazione che il regista ha con il regime totalitario del suo Paese, un regime che aveva già vietato a Rasoulof di continuare a esercitare la sua professione quando il suo film Goodbye (Be omid-e didar, 2011) fu presentato nella sezione Un Certain Regard a Cannes.
Il film, che racconta la storia di un avvocato a cui il governo ha revocato la licenza, era una sottile metafora su come gli artisti iraniani fossero stati costretti al silenzio e alla conformità. Come altri dissidenti, tra cui Jafar Panahi, Rasoulof è riuscito a lavorare, nonostante le restrizioni, e creare alcune delle opere più significative del cinema iraniano contemporaneo. Avvolti nel mistero e girati clandestinamente con permessi falsi, i suoi film successivi a questo divieto sono un duro attacco contro il regime autoritario del Paese.
Basti pensare a Manuscripts Don’t Burn (Dast-Neveshtehaa Nemisoozand, 2013), un thriller glaciale che documenta il tentativo fallito da parte del regime di liquidare degli scrittori iraniani dissidenti, in cui la rabbia e la melanconia di Rasoulof sono quasi
palpabili. Ancora più eloquente è il suo film seguente, A Man of Integrity (Lerd, 2017): una ferma denuncia alla corruzione dilagante nel Paese, superbamente interpretato dall’attore protagonista Reza Akhlaghirad. Il film ebbe gravi conseguenze per Rasoulof: gli costò il divieto di viaggiare per un anno e una condanna a un anno di prigione, pena che scontò nel 2019. Dopo questa esperienza, invece di arrendersi Rasoulof realizzò una delle sue opere più toccanti: There Is No Evil (Sheytân vojūd nadârad). Vincitore dell’Orso d’oro nel 2020, questo film-mosaico esplora il dilemma morale legato alla pena di morte in Iran.
Se There Is No Evil, che Rasoulof ha dichiarato essere ispirato alle sue esperienze personali, è pervaso da una melanconica introspezione, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Daneh Anjeer Moghadas) esprime la sua irrefrenabile rabbia e disperazione.
Ispirato dalle proteste del 2022, scaturite dalla morte di Mahsa Amini, uccisa mentre era in custodia della polizia per essersi opposta all’obbligo di indossare l’hijab, l’ultimo film di Rasoulof illustra come l’energia propulsiva della dissidenza si scontra con la rigida struttura del regime. Il regista traspone il conflitto in una piccola unità familiare, dove il padre, un ufficiale del governo, vede diminuire il suo potere e controllo sulle due figlie. Nelle mani di Rasoulof, il dramma familiare si trasforma in un thriller mozzafiato che incarna tutta l’ira e l’angoscia della società iraniana. Prima di arrivare a Locarno, il cineasta iraniano ha parlato a Pardo da un luogo non specificato in Germania, condividendo riflessioni sulla sua opera, la sua vita e le sue speranze per il futuro.
Hugo Emmerzael: La tua fuga fortuita dall’Iran immediatamente dopo la tua sentenza e il tuo arrivo a Cannes hanno avuto un grandissimo impatto sul mondo del cinema. Tutto questo è successo già alcuni mesi fa, quindi ho una domanda molto semplice e al contempo difficilissima: come ti senti ora?
Mohammad Rasoulof: Non è facile per me rispondere a questa domanda. Credo che comprenderlo sarà un processo molto lungo, soprattutto perché molte cose stanno ancora accadendo. Ho l’impressione che tutto sia distante e mi sento un po’ perso nel cercare di valutare tutto ciò che è accaduto. Penso di aver bisogno di molto più tempo e distanza per capire veramente e processare quanto è successo nel suo insieme. Ora come ora provo felicità e gratitudine per essere riuscito a completare questo film. Allo stesso tempo, sono preoccupato e triste per i miei amici e collaboratori, che si trovano ancora in una situazione difficile. Sono in balia di questi sentimenti contrastanti.
HE: Il fatto che tu sia riuscito ad arrivare a Cannes è stato sulla bocca di tutti, suscitando un grande interesse anche per il tuo film. Posso immaginare che questo abbia attirato l’attenzione non solo su di te ma anche sui tuoi collaboratori in Iran. In che modo il tuo grandissimo successo al festival ha influenzato le reazioni nel tuo Paese d’origine?
MR: Non appena la notizia della selezione a Cannes è stata resa pubblica, le autorità hanno iniziato a mettere sotto pressione i miei collaboratori, sia gli attori che i tecnici. Sapevano esattamente chi avesse partecipato al film e hanno esercitato pressioni su tutti. L’ufficio del mio direttore della fotografia, per esempio, è stato attaccato, e tutti i membri del cast e della troupe sono stati interrogati, esigendo che io ritirassi il film da Cannes. I miei collaboratori hanno rifiutato di farlo. Il momento di maggior tensione, però, l’abbiamo vissuto quando eravamo già a Cannes. Sono stati giorni difficili, durante i quali hanno tentato di tutto pur di farci ritirare il film. È stata avviata un’indagine contro tutti noi e contro coloro che sono rimasti in Iran. Fortunatamente, tutto ciò appartiene al passato ora, ma non possiamo far altro che aspettare. Non sappiamo ancora quando avrà luogo il processo né quale sarà il prossimo passo di questa procedura penale contro la troupe.
HE: Dev’essere stata un’esperienza molto dolorosa ed esasperante. In quale misura lasci che queste emozioni diventino parte del tuo processo creativo? Diresti che ti lasci trasportare dalle emozioni, o provi a frenarle mentre fai i tuoi film?
MR: Provo decisamente moltissima rabbia, così come tristezza e disperazione Questi traumi non derivano solo dalla mia esperienza personale come regista, ma anche dalla società in cui vivo. Sono consapevole delle ferite aperte dentro di me, mie e di tutti gli artisti iraniani che lavorano nelle mie stesse circostanze. Tuttavia, ho sempre cercato di trasformare questa rabbia in bellezza; descrivendo, osservando e condividendo la bellezza che vedo nei paesaggi iraniani e negli esseri umani. Questo è ciò che posso tenere stretto. Il mio atteggiamento e metodo creativo sono sempre orientati a risolvere problemi, ad aprirsi a livello personale, e spero di condividere queste emozioni con gli spettatori. Trasformare la rabbia in bellezza, credo sia il modo migliore per descrivere il mio processo creativo.
HE: Sono contento che tu abbia menzionato i paesaggi iraniani, perché gli ambienti naturali giocano un ruolo centrale nella tua opera. Si potrebbero quasi definire come degli altri personaggi o trame nei tuoi film. In Manuscripts Don’t Burn, A Man of Integrity, e There Is No Evil, sono carichi di significati simbolici. Come interpreti questa relazione tra i paesaggi naturali e i tuoi film?
MR: Prima di tutto, ho una connessione profonda e significativa con la natura e i territori incontaminati. Sono dei luoghi in cui mi sento sereno. Cerco di allontanarmi dalla città il più spesso possibile, anche quando lavoro ai miei film, li scrivo e penso a come metterli in scena. Preferisco trascorrere questi momenti immerso nella natura piuttosto che in un ambiente urbano. Sono sempre mosso dal desiderio di mostrare la bellezza del mio Paese nei miei film. Devo ammettere che allontanarmi dalla città è anche un modo per sfuggire alla censura e alla sorveglianza. Questo si vede anche nel mio lavoro: tutti i film che hai menzionato iniziano in città e poi si spostano verso la natura. Dobbiamo fuggire dalla città verso luoghi dove è più facile lavorare.
HE: In The Seed ofthe Sacred Fig il panorama sembra ancor più ricco di simbolismo, soprattutto nell’intensa scena finale, durante la quale i personaggi letteralmente si perdono tra le rovine.
MR: Per me, quel sito naturale è una metafora dell’Iran. C’è tutta questa bellezza, eppure è una rovina.
HE: Mi sembra che allegorie e metafore siano diventati aspetti sempre più centrali nel tuo cinema, pur mantenendo una forma implacabile di realismo. Come vedi questa dinamica tra realismo e metafora?
MR: Nei miei primi film, tendevo a preferire un linguaggio metaforico per evitare il confronto con la censura. Era un modo per sfuggire alla repressione che avrei subito facendo film e arte. Vedevo questo approccio anche come un ritorno alla tradizione della letteratura e della poesia persiana, dove metafore e allegorie sono elementi fondamentali dell’espressione. Lo trovavo sia conveniente che convincente. Con il tempo, però, ho capito che questo linguaggio metaforico era anche un modo per cedere alla censura, evitando di affrontare esplicitamente argomenti che avrebbero irritato le autorità. Ho quindi compreso l’importanza di diventare più diretto, per confrontarmi e affrontare in modo più esplicito l’ambiente circostante e i temi che potevo osservare e di cui potevo testimoniare. Questo cambiamento è avvenuto a metà della mia carriera, quando i miei film sono diventati più crudi nel rappresentare certe situazioni. Solo in questa terza e più recente fase del mio lavoro, i miei film hanno raggiunto una combinazione dei due aspetti, trattando
storie in modo sia diretto che allegorico o metaforico. Penso che The Seed of the Sacred Fig sia il film in cui sono riuscito meglio a combinare questi elementi. Da un lato, mostra la mia volontà di testimoniare ciò che accade nella società iraniana, mentre gli altri livelli richiedono un’interpretazione da parte del pubblico.
HE: La parola “confronto” sembrerebbe essere centrale, perché molti dei tuoi film ruotano intorno al dilemma tra obbedire e disobbedire gli ordini dello stato, o tra combattere e arrendersi. Con The Seed ofthe Sacred Fig trasponi questo dilemma societario in un’unità famigliare, dove un padre si piega al regime, mentre le sue figlie provano a ribellarsi e ad opporsi. In che modo questa piccola storia familiare diventa, per te, un simbolo della storia dell’Iran intero?
MR: Credo che ci siano alcuni interessi, domande o persino ossessioni che si mantengono da un film all’altro, senza che io voglia consapevolmente ritornarci o svilupparli ulteriormente. Prendono semplicemente forme diverse. Cerco sempre di comprendere questo sistema totalitario. Inizialmente, ho cercato di capirne i meccanismi: come funzionano questi sistemi e come sopravvivono? Poi, gradualmente, ho iniziato a essere più curioso riguardo agli individui. Cosa spinge queste persone a farne parte? Qual è il loro contesto sociale? Quali sono le loro specificità psicologiche? E i loro percorsi? Attraverso le mie esperienze, ho incontrato molti giudici, guardie carcerarie, interrogatori e ispettori, e ho iniziato a decifrare queste persone. Questo non porta molte risposte, non credo che otterremo mai risposte esaustive in questo senso, ma suggerisce qualcosa, ci offre qualche frammento di spiegazione. Cerco di costruire le mie sceneggiature e i miei personaggi a partire da queste osservazioni. In The Seed of the Sacred Fig questo è reso manifesto nel modo in cui il sistema di indottrinamento si insinua nella struttura familiare. Mostra come il sistema dipenda dall’aspettativa che qualcun altro penserà per te e ti trasmetterà le sue opinioni. È una catena: ricevi le tue credenze e idee dagli altri e ti aspetti che la persona sotto di te faccia lo stesso. C’è quindi questo indottrinamento, qualcosa che tu stesso trasmetti da un livello all’altro. Una scena del film mostra questo meccanismo in modo esplicito, quando il marito prega e sua moglie, dietro di lui, ripete i suoi stessi gesti, senza interrogarsi, senza essere coinvolta personalmente. È solo imitazione e riproduzione dello stesso discorso, delle stesse credenze e degli stessi gesti. Questa è la struttura che mi interessa.
HE: Prima di dedicarti al cinema, hai studiato sociologia. È ironico che, attraverso il tuo lavoro come cineasta, che ti ha condotto a vari scontri con il regime, tu abbia ottenuto una sorta di sintesi sociologica dei vari strati della burocrazia e dello stato iraniani. Non saresti, forse, involontariamente, un regista-sociologo che indaga le manifestazioni e i meccanismi interni di un sistema oppressivo verso i suoi cittadini?
MR: Non direi, perché la sociologia è una scienza e io non pretendo di descrivere in modo scientifico o oggettivo nelle situazioni che mostro nei miei film. Forse possiamo dire che i miei film presentano una visione onesta di alcune parti della società iraniana.
HE: Le due figlie in The Seed of the Sacred Fig diventano il simbolo di una nuova generazione di manifestanti e attivisti che, dal 2022 in poi, sono diventati il volto del dissenso iraniano. Nel film mostri l’immediatezza con cui elaborano tutto quello che accade nella società, ovviamente grazie ai feed dei social media e alle dirette video. Si crea una tensione interessante, perché questi sviluppi avvengono in successione rapida e sono ripresi in tempo reale. Tuttavia, ci sono voluti anni per realizzare il tuo film, che deve comunque evocare quest’immediatezza. Come descriveresti la relazione tra l’aspetto riflessivo del cinema e l’immediatezza di ciò che sta accadendo nella società?
MR: Quando vivi in un regime totalitario, ogni conflitto ti pone di fronte a un dilemma morale. Spesso ti trovi a dover rispondere a domande ed affrontare restrizioni che ti costringono a prendere una decisione. Queste decisioni hanno sempre diversi livelli: da un lato c’è l’immediatezza della scelta, dall’altro ci sono i valori morali su cui si basano le tue decisioni. Posso darti un esempio specifico tratto dal film. Quando la madre si trova di fronte all’amica ferita delle figlie, inizialmente è profondamente colpita e desidera aiutare la ragazza. Tuttavia, appena si riprende, realizza che anche lei ha una famiglia da proteggere e, invece di salvare o aiutare la ragazza, decide di preservare la sua famiglia. Una situazione simile accade con il padre, che inizialmente è riluttante a firmare le richieste di condanna a morte, ma presto si convince a farlo perché è sotto il controllo delle autorità e segue le loro dottrine. Questi dilemmi sono legati a diversi livelli temporali e mostrano la complessità delle scelte che i personaggi devono affrontare.
HE: Alcuni registi iraniani, come tu e Jafar Panahi, sono riconosciuti come mentori e maestri per le giovani generazioni di artisti e cineasti. Considerando i grandi eventi della tua vita privata e della società iraniana in generale, le lezioni di saggezza che desideri trasmettere alle nuove generazioni sono cambiate? Oppure il messaggio rimane lo stesso, nonostante le circostanze siano mutate?
MR: Non mi piace la prima parte della tua domanda, che mi presenta come un modello o qualcuno che ha dei consigli da impartire. Mi considero uno studente, qualcuno che cerca di sperimentare e non vuole sentirsi costretto da principi o regole imposte. Vorrei aggiungere che ho notato come i sistemi totalitari, in particolare quello iraniano, cerchino sempre di convincere le nuove generazioni di artisti che la politica è inutile e di poco interesse, e che l’arte non dovrebbe mischiarsi ad essa perché opera su un altro livello, affermano che sarebbe uno spreco d’arte occuparsene. Di fatto, più il sistema è totalitario, più tutto diventa politico. Ogni scelta, anche quella di rimanere in silenzio, diventa un modo di accettare la censura e consentire alle autorità di consolidare il loro potere. Il mio unico desiderio, in questo momento, è che la situazione diventi meno soffocante, che ci sia meno pressione e che io possa scegliere i soggetti dei miei film o il mio approccio estetico con maggiore libertà.
HE: Tutto questo mi ricorda dell’uomo nel tuo documentario Head Wind (Baad-e-daboor, 2008), che sostiene che “provare invano è molto meglio dell’apatia”. Non è questa segretamente la filosofia di tutta la tua opera?
MR: Esattamente. Inoltre, ho girato quel documentario tra due altri film. In quel periodo, volevo davvero conformarmi al sistema in cui lavoravo, cercando di ottenere i permessi necessari per svolgere il mio lavoro. Tuttavia, dopo il mio primo film, è diventato estremamente difficile ottenere un permesso per il secondo; quindi, ho deciso di realizzare un documentario tra un film e l’altro. Il permesso per il secondo film, ovviamente, non è mai arrivato per cui ho dovuto cambiare completamente il mio modo di lavorare. Quindi sì, tentare invano è ciò che ho sempre fatto ed è una buona descrizione del mio passato.
HE: Permettimi di farti una domanda riguardo al futuro incerto. Tu e l’Iran avete trascorso un periodo travagliato negli ultimi anni. Quali sono le tue speranze e le tue preoccupazioni per il futuro?
MR: Ci sono due livelli a questa domanda: uno personale e uno generale. Personalmente, a volte guardando indietro, mi dispiace che la vita sia così breve. Allo stesso tempo, gli scienziati affermano che ci sono molte galassie nell’universo e che noi viviamo in un minuscolo frammento di spazio. Considerando questo fatto, ci si rende conto di quanto una vita possa sembrare assurda. Tuttavia, nel tempo che ci è concesso di vivere, penso sia importante cercare di essere la migliore versione di noi stessi. Per me, ciò che è fondamentale è la libertà e la ricerca di questa libertà. L’evoluzione che considero essere più importante nella vita, specialmente in Iran, è quella culturale. Il cambiamento culturale è a rischio nel mio Paese e, allo stesso tempo, è necessario. Quindi cerco di contribuire, di avere un impatto culturale. È quanto di meglio io possa fare con la vita che mi è stata data. Questo implica non concentrarsi su una scala troppo vasta e non scoraggiarsi perché gli obiettivi sembrano irraggiungibili. Io penso piuttosto a questo: cosa posso fare nel mio piccolo per contribuire alla nostra lotta per la libertà e al cambiamento culturale? ◼ Tradotto da Tessa Cattaneo
◼ TheSeedoftheSacredFig screens on Sunday, 11.8 at 21:30 at the Piazza Grande
Mond
by Giovanni Marchini Camia
SELECTION COMMITTEE
Kurdwin Ayub’s Sonne, which won the Best First Feature Award when it premiered at the 2022 Berlinale, offers a spirited and candid account of a young Muslim woman’s experience living in Austria. As implied by the title, her follow-up Mond flips the perspective. This time, the protagonist is an Austrian woman who travels to Jordan for work and is thrown into a world with values and rules radically different to those back home.
In a terrific film acting debut, Florentina Holzinger plays Sarah, a retired MMA fighter who is hired as a private trainer by a rich Jordanian family. On arrival in Amman, Sarah is put up in a swanky hotel, then driven every day to a palatial home in the suburbs, where her task is to train three teenage sisters, who live there seemingly shut off from the outside world. A choreographer and performance artist, Holzinger brings an expressive physicality to the role. Sarah’s gradual progression from excitement to perplexity and eventually apprehension is largely conveyed by her posture and the way she moves through this foreign environment.
Ayub heightens the film’s realism with touches of genre, borrowing horror and thriller tropes to ramp up the tension and let us share in Sarah’s mounting suspicions and agitation. Why aren’t the sisters allowed to access the house’s WiFi network? Are the menacing bodyguards who follow them everywhere there to protect or surveil them? Who are their never-seen parents – and why does the friendly bartender at the hotel suddenly kill the conversation when Sarah brings up their family name? Instead of sticking her nose in other people’s business, wouldn’t it be better for everyone if she understood her place as an employee, a stranger and, especially, a woman?
Following Sonne, Ayub is again working with renowned director Ulrich Seidl as her producer. As distinct as their aesthetics might be, the two filmmakers share a propensity for fictions that stick close to reality, confronting the viewer with its uncomfortable truths and irreconcilable contradictions. Ayub’s script for Mond echoes numerous articles and documentaries about the draconian upbringings of the daughters of Middle Eastern elites – particularly the dramatic story of Dubai’s princess Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum and the Finnish capoeira instructor who became her confidante. By crafting a suspenseful drama and aligning our perspective so closely to Sarah’s, however, Ayub dissolves the supposedly objective distance of reportage. Imagining ourselves in Sarah’s shoes, we can’t help but question our own capacity for empathy and prejudice.
Stills from Sulla Terra Leggeri
Sulla Terra Leggeri
by Daniela Persico SELECTION COMMITTEE
È possibile concepire il nostro passaggio sulla terra come un volo? Leggero come un impossibile balzo all’indietro o una piroetta che per un attimo ferma la nostra immagine nel cielo prima di farci ritornare alla gravità della terra? Quale esperienza, se non l’amore, ci fa vivere questa sensazione di vertigine, smarrimento e ancora di pienezza?
Sulla terra leggeri – bellissimo titolo ispirato dal romanzo del 1996 di Sergio Atzeni – è l’esordio alla regia di Sara Fgaier, autrice già conosciuta per il suo raffinato lavoro sugli archivi che ha dato vita a Gli anni (dal testo di Annie Ernaux, premiato come miglior cortometraggio agli EFA nel 2018) e alla sinergia tra montaggio e ricerca per La bocca del lupo di Pietro Marcello. Proprio in questo crinale tra rimemorazione e presenza si situa la storia di un amore, tra Italia, Francia e Tunisia, un amore perduto fin dalla prima immagine in cui la morte di una donna coincide con la sparizione della sua immagine dalla testa del marito, Gian, un professore di etnomusicologia (interpretato da Andrea Renzi). Un lungo processo d’attraversamento di diversi sé stesso in epoche della sua giovinezza lo accompagnerà progressivamente ad accettare la morte e ad accogliere quanto persiste di quel grande amore, la dolce presenza della figlia Miriam (Sara Serraiocco).
Un film romantico, quasi senza freni, nel suo immergersi in quei sentimenti così puri che porta con sé il primo amore e il suo “per sempre”: evitando il topos del “primo sguardo”, spesso raccontato al cinema, il film si racchiude in una serata insieme portatrice di una promessa (sottolineata dalla fotografia sensoriale di Alberto Fasulo, regista di Menocchio), un momento su cui si ritorna innervando ogni volta nuova forza all’amore e alla capacità di stare “leggeri” sulla terra.
Un film che non ha bisogno di collocare temporalmente o dettagliare psicologicamente i due innamorati, facendoli così diventare una coppia mitologica (che non a caso attraversa gli elementi della natura, l’aria, l’acqua e le viscere di una grotta) sapendo incarnare anche una “stretta di mano” attraverso il Mediterraneo. Forse sono solo riflessi autobiografici (la regista è cresciuta in una famiglia dal padre tunisino), ma la radicalità di questo rimosso personale non concerne soltanto il dolore della scomparsa dell’amata, ma più profondamente guarda a due culture che a lungo si sono rispecchiate ed ora sembrano aver dimenticato il loro passato. Solo la lieve forza dell’amore porterà una speranza.
Holy Electricity
by Stefan Ivančić SELECTION COMMITTEE
Geographically positioned in the Caucasus, on the frontier between worlds, at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and West Asia, contemporary Georgia is a divided society. Torn between conservativism and progressiveness, between the still-ongoing Russian influence and a desire to move on from its Soviet past, it’s a country immersed in constant political turmoil. As much as this represents an unsettling socio-political situation, especially for its younger population, it has also been fertile ground for artists and, in this case specifically, filmmakers. In the past decade, we have witnessed an extraordinary introduction of film prodigies from Georgia, especially considering that the country’s population is just over 3.5 million inhabitants.
The headliners would certainly include Alexandre Koberidze, whose What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? became one of 2021’s best-of-the-year films after its presentation at the Berlinale, and Dea Kulumbegashvili, whose Beginning (2020) was the great discovery of the Covid year, receiving the Cannes ‘label’ and winning all the main awards at the San Sebastian Film Festival. But apart from these two bright stars, Georgia has also recently fostered such amazing filmmakers as Ana Urushadze (Scary Mother, Locarno 2017), Elene Naveriani (Wet Sand, Locarno 2021), Davit Pirtskhalava (A Long Break, 2022), Lasha Tskvitinidze (I’m Beso, 2014, and the upcoming Field), Giga Liklikadze (Pig, 2019), Rezo Gigineishvili (Patient No. 1, 2023), George Sikharulidze (Panopticon, 2024), and Levan Akin (And Then We Danced, 2019), just to name a few…
The new Georgian talents introduced by Holy Electricity are first-time helmer Tato Kotetishvili, here acting as both director and cinematographer, and his two misfits Gonga and Bart, played with compelling authenticity by non-professionals Nika Gongadze and Nikolo Ghviniashvili, respectively. Gonga is a teenager whose special gift is playing the recorder with his nose, while Bart is the gambler uncle who has taken care of the youngster after his father’s passing. The two of them are the kings of the local scrapyards, navigating their lives through literal fields of garbage in which they find survival, acceptance and love. Roaming the streets of Tbilisi like stray dogs, with the neon crosses they sell door-to-door in hand, they meet an amalgam of picturesque characters: a couple of elderly ladies living in a basement surrounded by plushies, including Cheburashka, the so-called Soviet Mickey Mouse; a flea market elastic salesman who can squeeze his whole body into small boxes; a slim Santa-Claus-looking old man who collects and plays music instruments; a lonely middle-aged woman who builds nativity sets with dinosaur toys, caricaturesque dolls of Putin and Buddhas in an aquarium; and a beautiful young Roma girl selling coffee on the streets, among others.
Holy Electricity presents a campy world full of queer characters amongst tapestries, cats, doilies, dilapidated buildings, waste of different kinds, and unfinished churches. It features a world of diversity in its purest and freest form, removed from political correctness, connecting with the ideals of naïve art and finding beauty where it is least expected. It assembles a mosaic of modern Tbilisi as a heterogenous meeting point, which, despite the gray socio-political scenery, appears as a colourful city full of vitality, youthful resistance and emancipatory potential.
Live from Locarno77: Ramon and Silvan Zürcher on DerSpatz im Kamin
Leonard Krähmer was at the press conference on Saturday, 10.8 for the Zürchers’ latest film
As identical twin brothers, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher collaborate on a level of mutual inspiration that must be rare in the industry. After their formally radical first feature The Strange Little Cat (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen, 2013), which Ramon directed and Silvan produced, the roles shifted when both started working separately on their own screenplays.
While Silvan’s script resulted in The Girl and the Spider (Das Mädchen und die Spinne, 2021), for which he is also credited as co-director, Der Spatz im Kamin might appear as a return to their original division of roles, with Ramon again directing and Silvan serving as producer. Yet the Zürchers insist that their “highly dynamic working process relies on intuition and lacks any recipe.” When asked if Der Spatz im Kamin can be considered as a loose final act of a trilogy, Ramon admitted: “This wasn’t planned initially. The three films are almost like siblings as they share many similar formal and narrative ideas.” Fittingly, the overarching theme is in fact family itself; how unresolved conflict and latent desire simmer in cramped kitchen interiors – and a seemingly idyllic garden that “enables a fluid transition between inside and outside.” The title conveys a sense of waiting for some sort of relief: “I wanted to take this image of being imprisoned very literally,” Ramon explained. “It is possible to break out of your cage, to liberate yourself and fly away, to leave your dark clouds and shadows behind.”
It’s All a Matter of Influence
by Julia Schubiger
SELECTION COMMITTEE
Every day at 14:30 p.m., La Sala unveils a new program of carefully selected short films. Sunday’s menu delves into the multifaceted meaning of “influence” in our society. Each of the five shorts explores how individuals are impacted by external forces, whether that means personal relationships or societal expectations.
The documentary Despre imposibilitatea unui omagiu (On the Impossibility of an Homage), directed by Xandra Popescu, tries to offer a portrait of Ion Tugearu, a rockstar of ballet in Communist Romania. The strong-willed dancer and choreographer has conducted his own world for years, and when Popescu reached out to him about the idea of filming him for this project, Tugearu saw it as a huge opportunity. But to make it happen, he must let himself be directed. And that... isn’t easy.
Sometimes the influence is not human but natural. Such is the case in Camille Monnier’s beautifully animated Soleil Gris (Ashen Sun). Working in a motel with an empty pool becomes the most boring job in the world for two cousins. All that’s left to do is bicker - that’ll pass the time!
Lux Carne, by the Swiss director Gabriel Grosclaude, imagines a dystopian future where one must have a license to eat meat. This thought-provoking short slowly morphs into a delirious journey into human darkness. Who will influence whom? Vegetarians or carnivores?
Some encounters leave a lifelong mark on us. In the mysterious 400 Cassettes, Greek director Thelyia Petraki recounts a magic-realist fable based on the astronomy theory that when we look at the stars, we’re actually looking at the past. Elly and Faye will learn from the night that nothing lasts forever.
Finally, the program concludes with the solid black comedy 1 hijo & 1 padre (A Son & a Father), which takes an ironic look at machismo and the dynamics fueling toxic camaraderie between men. After his 2016 short Eden (El Edén, which premiered at the Berlinale), Damiana (unveiled in Cannes in 2017), and The Pack (La jauría, which nabbed the 2022 Grand Prix in the Critics Week at Cannes), Andrés Ramírez Pulido crafts another piercing chapter in his ongoing genealogy of violence in Colombia, his home country.
Although not necessarily intended, the director encouraged the audience to read his focus on emotionally repressed mother characters – in this case embodied by a captivating Maren Eggert – as commentary on present day controversies, such as “the discourse around regretting motherhood”. The same applies to the rather explicit allusions to closeted homosexuality as fuel for multigenerational trauma. But beneath it all, the film aims for more existential, universally human affects that form a “cosmos of physical and emotional violence.” Even though it might be tempting to search for an autobiographical core behind Der Spatz im Kamin, the twins were quick to clarify that, apart from a general interest in the “destructive potential of interpersonal dynamics,” the blatantly violent events in the film bear little resemblance to their own family history. “It’s a personal film, but not a private film. After all, we were not allowed to have any pets.”
Mond premieres at 16:30 at Palexpo (FEVI) Sulla Terra Leggeri premieres at 14:00 at Palexpo (FEVI)
Holy Electricity premieres at 18:00 at PalaCinema 1
The fourth Pardi di Domani program screens at 14:30 at La Sala
PARDI DI DOMANI
Uniti dall'amore per i film.
Grande cinema in Piazza Grande o a casa, con blue TV.
Pronti, insieme.
A Portrait of Locarno as Remembered by its Guests
In the weeks leading up to the Festival, we reached out to some of Locarno’s most illustrious former guests and asked them to share their first memories of the fest – whether that meant impressions from their world premieres or casual walks around the lake. The result, Beginnings, is a treasure trove of anecdotes and recollections; a polyphonic mosaic of the Festival assembled by those who’ve shaped its history.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2015
My best memory of the Locarno International Film Festival is, of course, when in 2015 the four actresses who starred in Happy Hour won the Best Actress Award together. The program director at the time, Carlo Chatrian, came to visit our dinner (cheese fondue) and let us know about it. Luckily, all the main actresses had come to Locarno, though we had not expected any award and were actually just making plans to return home, so we were so surprised. At the awards ceremony, Sachie Tanaka, who had studied in Germany, gave a speech in German because there was no Japanese interpreter. No one from the Japanese media who was present that night could understand German, so they were confused and asked her to translate what she had said into Japanese. It was a funny moment. I can’t forget taking a commemorative photo that night with Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can, 2015) team. Thank you again, Locarno, for all those memories.
Nele Wohlatz, 2016
My first time in Locarno was also my first time attending a major film festival. I had made a film, The Future Perfect (El futuro perfecto, 2016), with almost no money, and certainly didn’t have enough to stay a whole week in Locarno. Together with another film delegation from Argentina, I rented a small apartment in Ascona. The shuttle service between the two cities worked badly. Before traveling to Switzerland from Buenos Aires, an older film director gave me some advice. “Don’t worry about staying in Ascona, there’s a free e-bike rental in Locarno,” he said. “You’re meant to give the e-bike back at the end of the day, but they don’t mind if you keep it for the whole week.”
And so during the seven days I spent at the festival I happily biked up and down the hills between Locarno and Ascona. The weather was nice; the e-bike great. I was a bit stressed about our premiere, but there were many interesting films to watch and people to talk to. Towards the end of the week, I was informed that I would receive a prize during the awards ceremony at the Piazza Grande. A limousine was going to pick me up at the apartment. Since I had to give back the e-bike, I asked the car to pick me up at the bike rental instead.
The rental was tucked inside a white tent. A young woman came outside to pick up my e-bike. When I told her my name to have my ID back, her face dropped and she disappeared inside the tent again. Seconds later a middle-aged man flung the sloppy tent door open as if it were a theatrer curtain, and dramatically asked: “Who is Nele?” “Me,” I said. As he started to shout at me, a black limousine showed up, and a festival volunteer – an “angel”, as they were called – asked me to get in. But the man wasn’t ready yet. His face had turned red. “You will never ever get an e-bike in Locarno again,” he barked. “You will be blacklisted!!” “The ceremony is about to start,” the angel kept saying. I apologized to the man and told him I had to go and pick up a Golden Leopard, and hopped into the car. I still feel a bit bad. If he did send me a fine, it never made it to Argentina. One day I’ll have to go back to Locarno and find out if there really is a blacklist.
The Biggest of the Small Festivals
By Cyril Cordoba
For this year’s edition of Pardo, we invited historians Cyril Cordoba and Lucia Leoni to take us daily on a tour through the Locarno Film Festival’s history, chapter by chapter.
Locarno’s 1980s editions are still remembered vividly by a generation of cinephiles. Poignant screenings such as La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars) in 1982 – accompanied by actual shooting stars crossing the sky above the Piazza Grande! – are no doubt engraved in the memory of those who were present. It was over the course of this decade that the Locarno Film Festival embraced the identity by which we know it today: the world capital of auteur cinema. Under the direction of David Streiff, it grew considerably, acquiring a reputation as “the biggest of the small festivals”. In 1982, attendance was estimated at 20,000, but by 1985, it had shot up to 80,000. This transformation was fueled by private sector partnerships and support – and again by the construction of the FEVI theater (Palexpo) in 1988, which considerably increased audience capacity.
The Festival’s visual identity got a sleek makeover in this decade too. With the lion – the heraldic symbol of the city of Locarno – having been claimed by the Venice Film Festival as its own mascot, in 1982 the LFF picked the leopard, already the namesake of its prizes, as its official trademark. Black and yellow spread throughout the city: appearing on staff clothing and in shop windows, on promotional material and even urban infrastructure. This was not only a publicity stunt, but also a political statement: after decades of crises and controversies, the Festival had earned its place in Locarno’s cultural heritage. It was here to stay.
Between 1983 and 1987, Locarno became a place for new, experimental formats, thanks in part to a section dedicated to TV movies. The Festival also began to publish monographs dedicated to each retrospective, while continuing to welcome films representing national cinemas in transformation, from countries such as Brazil, Iran, Burkina Faso, and Mali. Of these, the most memorable breakout was Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang tu di, 1984) in 1985, which heralded the arrival of China’s so-called “Fifth Generation”, the first wave of Chinese films to garner recognition on the international film festival circuit. That same year, Locarno also programmed Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (Qing mei zhu ma, 1985), a seminal film of the burgeoning Taiwanese New Wave. In the wake of the success of these films at Locarno, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan would regularly send significant new works to the Festival, Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (Hong gao liang, 1988) amongst them.
Auteurs were also emerging in the United States: independent filmmakers such as Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch started their international careers at Locarno – and European directors like Wim Wenders and Aki Kaurismäki benefitted similarly from the Festival’s enthusiasm for auteur cinema. However, films made by women went almost completely unawarded at the Festival throughout the entire decade, despite the progress in representation made in the 1970s. Was this regression a reflection of some kind of cultural backlash? Either way, it wouldn’t be until the new millennium that women would again play a prominent role at Locarno. In the ’90s, however, the Festival’s gaze would be concentrated on the East.
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Open Doors Locarno Pro
Confession Cam:
Gender Dynamics in ILovePapuchi and Dereinasyotroscolores
Hombres necios que acusáis a la mujer sin razón, sin ver que sois la ocasión de lo mismo que culpáis
by Ena Alvarado
You foolish men who lay the guilt on women, not seeing you’re the cause of the very thing you blame.
– Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Hombres necios que acusáis” – “You Foolish Men”
It seems painfully obvious to note that gender relations have always been fraught, particularly in Latin America. Evidence of this dates back to at least 1689, when Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a cloistered nun living in New Spain (present-day Mexico), published her widely read poem, “You Foolish Men”. Her opening lines starkly pit men against women, the former as the root of conflicts and the latter as their main targets. In conversation with this perennial debate, a group of short films in this year’s Open Doors Screenings program offer a more complicated and thought-provoking picture of the dynamics between Latin American men and women, taking an honest and, at times, uncomfortable look at the nature of machismo today.
“The real wrong with him is that he doesn’t want children. He doesn’t like fat women. He says only he can be fat. So, if I want to stay with him... I can’t get fat.” This disturbing, unequivocal statement comes from Mamuti, the candid protagonist in Cuban director Rosa María Rodríguez Pupo’s I Love Papuchi (2018). Over the course of preparing lunch, Mamuti (Arianna Delgado) speaks openly about her life with Papuchi, her longtime boyfriend. His outrageous demands on her body reveal him as a controlling and intolerant man, but we never actually see him on-screen. Instead, the handheld camera focuses exclusively on Mamuti as she cuts meat, fries plantains, smokes cigarettes, and sets the table.
Little, if anything, beyond Papuchi’s own gratification seems to matter within the confines of their apartment. Yet, to characterize him solely as exploitative would amount to a dangerously simplistic reading. For instance, Mamuti speaks at length about how much she enjoys having sex with him: “I was in heaven. There I was, riding the bull.” She also claims that, thanks to him, she recovered her self-esteem and sense of worth. To be sure, none of these details necessarily rule out the existence of an abusive or at least toxic relationship between them. What remains clear, however, is that Mamuti wants to be with Papuchi – “He is the man I love” – not out of necessity or fear, but because of how he makes her feel.
This set-up complicates the “us versus them” understanding of machismo that Sor Juana sketched out in her poem. Expressions of masculinity, Rodríguez Pupo seems to suggest, are closely intertwined with the demands of femininity too. The confessional structure of I Love Papuchi gives further weight to this: Mamuti knows at all times that she is being recorded – she makes eye contact with the lens, giving the sense that she is talking directly to the viewer. At the start of the film, her answers to the crew’s questions feel guarded and cautious. By the end, she seems incapable of hiding her true feelings, sometimes giving way to unexpected outbursts of emotion. We can thus be more certain that what she says is what she truly believes.
“Do I feel good with being a man? Yeah. I’m okay with my body and with what I am.” So says Gabo, one of the five Guatemalan men featured in Juan Herrera Zuluaga’s intimate documentary, De reinas y otros colores (About Queens and Other
Colors, 2021). Like his peers, Gabo performs as a drag artist, crossdressing for pleasure and entertainment. Their vocation requires both skill and creativity – with makeup, clothes, attitude. Given where they live, it also calls for thick skin and great courage. “Your masculinity is taken away from you. Here in Guatemala and other countries... femininity is degraded,” explains Peppe, another of the film’s performers, in an interview.
By collapsing traditional gender expectations, the men in Herrera Zuluaga’s short film are perceived by others – family members; colleagues; strangers – as threatening. Yet crucially, in playing with feminine aesthetics and behaviors, they are not looking to renounce their masculinity. Just as I Love Papuchi reveals that men are not always uniquely responsible in reinforcing machista conditions, De reinas y otros colores confirms that women are not the only victims of this corrosive culture.
“I want to demonstrate that being different is okay. That being different is valid. That being different is something beautiful,” Gabo insists. What the men in De reinas y otros colores want goes beyond mere tolerance – “that being different is okay.” They are fighting for a much more ambitious future, one in which their version of masculinity can bring delight.
Rodríguez Pupo and Herrera Zuluaga are by no means the only filmmakers concerned with gender in the Open Doors roster of shorts. Dominican director Olivia De Camps probes the unjust demands a father makes upon his daughter in Sirena (2024), and Ecuadorian director Rob Mendoza’s Las Maravillas (Back to Las Maravillas, 2024) follows a gay man’s journey of redemption in the face of rejection from his family. (Mendoza’s upcoming feature, Ovnis en el Trópico, is also part of this year’s Open Doors Projects Hub.)
Still, I Love Papuchi and De reinas y otros colores feel quite different to those two other dramas, perhaps because they lie outside the world of pure fiction. They are also both structured on the basis of testimonies – confessions, if you will. In this way, they upend the purpose of confession as it figures in Judeo-Christian tradition, which sees it as an acknowledgment of sin. For Mamuti as for Gabo, Peppe, and the other Guatemalan drag queens, confessions are nothing but declarations of who they are or want to be.
I Love Papuchi reveals that men are not always uniquely responsible in reinforcing machista conditions, De reinas
y otros colores
confirms that
women
are not the only victims of this corrosive culture.
◼ ILovePapuchi screens on Tuesday, 13.8 at 11:30 at Teatro Kursaal.
◼ De reinasyotroscolores screened on Friday 09.8
Ena Alvarado is a Venezuelan writer based in Berlin. A member of the Locarno77 Letterboxd Piazza Grande Jury, Alvarado’s work has appeared in Americas Quarterly, JSTOR Daily, and The Atlantic. She made her acting debut in Los capítulos perdidos (2024), which is screening at this year’s Locarno Open Doors.
“A Machine for Fiction”
Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez on
Invention
Ahead of this morning’s world premiere of the elusive Cineasti del Presente title Invention, Pardo spoke with director Courtney Stephens and star Callie Hernandez about complicated dads, meta-fiction, and the strange but generative shapes into which we pour our grief, and our beliefs.
By Keva York
Invention, the first collaboration between filmmaker Courtney Stephens (Terra Femme, 2021) and actress Callie Hernandez (Under the Silver Lake, 2018), is punctuated with snippets of old morning TV shows. Each features a bespectacled man gently spruiking a supplement or medical device – Hernandez’s own father, a doctor who devoted himself to an array of esoteric passions up until his death in 2021. These clips work to foreground his absence from the film’s narrative: Invention follows Hernandez’s fictionalized character, Carrie, via a series of almost self-contained episodes, as she attempts to process his passing. Carrie’s sole inheritance is the patent for a mysterious medical device, to which she finds herself strangely drawn: it is the glowing heart of this sober but slyly funny work of micro-budget experimentation.
Keva York: There’s a very enigmatic intermingling of fiction and autobiographical and archival elements in this film. You’ve got footage of Callie’s real dad woven into this narrative about Callie’s character dealing with the death of her father. Was this sort of meta-narrative part of your original conception?
Courtney Stephens: Callie and I had known each other for years through friends, and we ran into each other at a dinner party a couple years ago, pretty soon after she lost her dad. We ended up going off to a corner and just talking for a long time. My own dad died in 2007, and both our dads were these big characters. We also talked about some of the irrational thinking, coupled with the bureaucracy, that follows the death of a dad. The film actually started as very much a fiction, trying to depict some of these things, but slowly we understood that this project was a response to something that had taken place in Callie’s life – and then she realized that she had this archive from when he was a TV doctor.
Callie Hernandez: I had just started this home studio, Neurotika Haus, so Courtney and I were kicking around the idea of making something together in the house. Watching my dad’s videotape archive, the project became something that was more centered around him – his physicality, his brain, and like, the specifics of his niche, sort of “new age” medical realm. He didn’t invent anything himself, but he did have two garages full of thousands of dollars-worth of mystery medical devices, and I fell a little bit in love with all these sculptural machines.
CS: We thought we could build a fiction around that – put one such mysterious object at the center of the inquiry. And my dad had developed a patent, so I had dealt with a very dramatic thing with angry investors after his death. Ultimately the whole thing fell apart, it was painful. I remember at the time thinking, “If we can save this thing, maybe that changes his fate.” So, I was familiar with that headspace.
KY: But the idea of working with fiction was at the project’s core. Is this your first fiction film, Courtney? How did that feel?
CS: Yeah it is. I actually attended the AFI [the American Film Institute ] , which is a narrative film school, but I’ve been making non-fiction and experimental work since then. And the film draws on those techniques too – moving between archive, performed scenes, and other elements. Something we were explicitly trying to explore is the attempt to create fiction out of experience – how fictions help us manage grief. Also, the relationship between public fiction and private fantasy.
KY: How do you mean?
CS: By fantasy, I mean a sense of reality being permeable; those aspects of our interior lives that shape our unconscious, but also one’s feelings of actual possibility – which is where people differ radically. Growing up around a parent with an overactive fantasy life can be this huge gift, because perhaps that gives you permission to look beyond what’s apparent, but it can also be very tricky. Is it a space of dream, or some form of conscription? Where’s the line between imagination and manipulation? That’s always a question with fiction filmmaking as well – certainly in non-fiction, too. But as a child, those boundaries are especially hard to differentiate, and you also might feel that if you don’t enter the dreams or beliefs of your parent, you don’t get to be close to them. So, these are some of the elements we were working with.
But we were also trying to tap into something larger than personal psychology – like, the kind of collective fantasy space of national media, which is easier to parse in older TV media, when there were fewer channels. Because I would say America is kind of grieving as a country right now, and actively seeking national fictions to disappear into. That idea, and the differences between the late ’90s and today, is part of what the film is feeling around for.
CH: I think that there are fantastic elements at play, but in making this film, it also seemed sort of obvious to examine grief as its own kind of conspiracy – which maybe suggests that conspiracy theories are kind of a response to the sense of hopelessness that we’re all feeling. I remember that one of the actors that we were working with was just watching video after video after video, and one of the other actors asked him, “Why are you watching that stuff?” And his response was, “Because I’m just hoping that one of these things is true.” That was a little bit of a moment for me.
KY: Forgive me if this seems trite, but – the film is centered around this healing device, and the film itself also seems to function on one level as a healing device, or there’s at least a therapeutic element to it. Is that a fair metaphor to draw?
CS: Well, what the machine actually does and whether it works is maybe the animating question of the film, but maybe not – and if it’s not, then it’s something else that the machine, and the film for that matter, wants us to learn through it. Long after shooting I realized that the film has something in common with this ’90s TV show Out of this World, where this girl’s dad is an alien who lives inside a crystal on her bedside table, and gives her advice and superpowers. The machine is this locus of possibility. It’s a machine for fiction perhaps – fiction is the therapeutic modality.
KY: I feel like there are two main ways that ‘the real’, let’s say, intervenes in the fiction. There’s the archival footage of Callie’s dad, and then there are these recurring sequences where all you see on screen is a candle, but you also hear the performers speaking as themselves, commenting on the action. I’m curious about both of these things: Courtney, could you speak to the decision to include this archival material, and also these very deliberately framed ‘behind the scenes’ interludes?
CS: So, one offers these traces of the father, while also speaking to this history of alternative medicine and, you could say, ‘wellness culture’, and how it fits into mainstream discourse. And of course it’s to see Callie’s dad and get a sense of him as a human being – but that morning show TV affect is quite impenetrable; we can never really know someone through it. There’s a frustration in having that be the only way to access him in the film. And then the behind-the-scenes stuff is kind of the actual space of grief – these incidental exchanges where ‘the real’ is revealed – like when Callie talks about playing her dad a certain song while he was in the hospital dying. We were thinking about the film as a sort of ragtag funeral, with its testimonies and its organ music, but it’s also a scrapbook that allows in all kinds of things you wouldn’t include in a normal funeral – all the awkward or uncomfortable conversations you have in that aftermath. We were making something with a lot of like, disjunctions and non-sequiturs that
became a record of the film’s creation, rather than something smooth. There’s this idea that grieving has stages, like Kübler-Ross, and I suppose it does. But memorialization doesn’t have to be virtuosic; I think it’s often in small interactions with others that you keep your relationship with a loved one going. You talk about them. You explain them. You defend them. So, the fiction scenes prompted us to discuss those real elements – and, it was also fun to work with many actors who are themselves directors working between these spaces in different ways.
KY: Yes, there are some real micro-budget cinema luminaries in the cast: Caveh Zahedi; Joe Swanberg; James N. Kienitz Wilkins. Were you specifically looking to cast filmmakers, or is that just something that happens when you’re making a micro-budget film?
CS: A little of both! It was fun to let the film dip into these other filmmakers’ fictional personae as well, because the people you named often appear as alter-egos in their own work. It was also just really helpful to have them around, because we were making this film in such a crazy way. We had exactly one crew member –our DP, Rafael Palacio Illingworth – and he was busy dealing with shooting Super 16 and also doing sound. The whole film cost less than $20,000, so everyone who showed up was helping out a lot and helping us to think through how to adapt our outline to the constraints of production. It was nice to work with people who had a lot of experience doing that, and who could cheer us on. All those guys are dads, too – dads with active fantasy lives.
KY: And what was that collaboration like for you, Callie, as the lead actress? I understand that the scenes were semi-improvised?
CH: I wouldn’t necessarily say “improvised”, but it was a similar process. I made a film called Jethica (2022) during the pandemic with one of my best friends, Pete Ohs. We just had half an outline and ideas of what needed to happen in each scene, and then every morning we’d work out the dialogue. I’m probably most comfortable working that way, and that’s essentially what we did here – but I didn’t really approach this film as an actress first. It’s something that I wanted to make to explore the material for myself – it’s not meant as like, a showcase for my actorly talents. I really feel like I’m almost just an observer for the most part.
KY: I have one more, kind of bigger picture question for both of you, about the fantasies we invent in response to personal or collective trauma – like, say, the rise of spiritualism during World War I. But where spiritualism, at least as it was practiced in that era, has been more or less debunked, I think it’s increasingly hard to draw the line between like, foil hat conspiracy and legitimate line of speculation. What are your thoughts on that sorting process?
CH: It’s a good question – where do you draw the line? I don’t know, but I do think because of the world I was kind of in, through my dad, I’m a born sceptic. And that’s why it felt like the right thing to do in this film was to be an observer, you know? I guess I don’t know what “too far” is, but I’m more interested in why people go there.
CS: I love this question. And I do ironically feel that my relationship to these things is a little bit informed by my own relationship to my dad – of never wanting to foreclose the possibility that things may just work out; could just take a wild turn. I like to be a believer. Like everyone else, I’ve been burned by that same instinct, but, as someone who’s had health problems, I want to leave room for new, non-obvious modes of healing. And probably my interest in cinema itself comes from growing up with that capacity for belief. I’m also working on a film about John C. Lilly right now, who was this controversial scientist turned kind of new age messiah figure. He suggested that all the coincidences we experience are being engineered by a council of alien intelligences, basically to let you know that they’re managing things and not to worry so much. And you know, I’m willing to entertain that – or I’m at least willing to entertain it as a way of navigating life.
◼ Invention premieres today, 11.8 at 11:30 at PalaCinema 1
Still from Invention
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig — Illustration of the film by Sahar Ghorishi