Festival:
The 75th Locarno Film Festival
Dates:
August 3-13
About:
Just under a third of the approximately 80 new feature presentations at this noted Swiss festival are nonfiction.
Among the offerings:
FRAGMENTS FROM HEAVEN
Director: Adnane Baraka
Mohamed – the nomad – and Abderrahmane – the scientist – comb through the arid lands of the vast Moroccan desert looking for meteorites with the power to transform the lives of those who find them.
THE HAMLET SYNDROME
Director: Elwira Niewiera, Piotr Rosołowski
A powerful portrait of a young generation of Ukrainians having to confront their war trauma and tackle the painful past, which now becomes their present and future alike.
IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA
Director: Ana Vaz
A wildlife eco-horror following the trajectories of endangered species fleeing to escape extinction.
LIKE AN ISLAND
Director: Tizian Büchi
In the heat of the summer, two watchmen patrol the river that runs through a neighborhood in Lausanne.
MATTER OUT OF PLACE
Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
A film about waste in remote areas and about the Sisyphus-like work of people who are trying to clean up.
NO DOGS OR ITALIANS ALLOWED
Director: Alain Ughetto
A grandson travels back in time via animation to revisit the history of his family in an intimate dialogue with his grandmother Cesira.
OBSCURE NIGHT – WILD LEAVES (THE BURNING ONES, THE OBSTINATE)
Director: Sylvain George
Melilla, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, is a land border between the African continent and Europe – a buffer zone where European migration policies, their challenges, and their consequences are read and shown.
PROLOGOS
Director: Mantas Kvedaravičius
A lone prophet from Sudan imagines his journey through the landscape that once was glorious Greece – a trip haunted by seventeen dogs, an abandoned textile factory, and unrequited love.
THE RIVER IS NOT A BORDER
Director: Alassane Diago
Forty protagonists, witnesses, and victims look back at the 1989 massacres on both sides of the Senegal River, the border between Mauritania and Senegal, in order to understand what really happened, and try to take a step towards reconciliation together.
TALES OF THE PURPLE HOUSE
Director: Abbas Fahdel
The French-Iraqi filmmaker and his wife, the painter Nour Ballouk, start exploring Lebanon through their art, to grasp the beauty and hardships of a generous country that seems to be on the edge of the abyss.
THE VISITORS
Director: Veronika Lišková
A young anthropologist moves with her family to Svalbard, Norway, to study how life is changing in polar regions but must work out to what extent she can get involved in the local community that she originally only intended to observe.
WHERE IS THIS STREET? OR WITH NO BEFORE OR AFTER
Director: João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata
Using THE GREEN YEARS (Paulo Rocha, 1963) as a starting point, and guided by Rocha’s gaze, a look back at the places of that film, which have become naturally different.
what (not) to doc 