Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a series of correspondence pieces written by the participants in the Critics Academy.
Illustrations by Lucy Jones.
At its simplest, the concept of home may evoke a child’s drawing of a house with a smoking chimney, but it takes on greater complexity in its representation on screen. The idea of home can encompass its physical attributes—a house’s space, its usage—as well as its ability to transcend four walls, extending into the broader cityscape, providing a sense of security.
The following pieces consider how the concept is explored in film, reflecting on cinematic form and style, depictions of intimacy, and home’s status as an ideal in radical flux, yet to be fully realized.
Cent mille milliards (Virgil Vernier, 2024).
Close to Home (Victor Morozov)
Some of the most challenging films from Locarno’s main competition seemed to address the theme of homesickness, as if home were always someplace else—never here. At one point in Virgil Vernier’s spectral Cent mille milliards (2024), the protagonist, Afine (Zakaria Bouti), recounts how he doesn’t want to go home, preferring instead to drift aimlessly among the dormant villas and yachts in Monaco during the Christmas holiday void, when everybody is away. As city life stalls and a languorous rhythm overtakes the film—the camera attends to the eerie flickering of Christmas lights in empty homes—the young man spends time with a Serbian woman, Vespa, who dreams of opening a healing clinic (and even performs a stone ritual in front of the camera), and Julia, the twelve-year-old girl she is babysitting. Talking is all they do: by the end of the holidays, this is the closest the film gets to a sense of friendship. Could this exchange, which ends up taking much of the running time, represent home—more so, at least, than the house Afine shares here with three other friends and fellow sex workers, who leave to spend the end of the year in Dubai, a different moneyed milieu?
Yet to speak solely in terms of narrative could not do justice to this film: Vernier’s idea of plot is ethereal, guided by an absurdist version of magical thinking. We never learn much about Afine, his background, or how he came to live in Monaco as an escort. Instead, the film dwells in a liquid present. Afine is torn between a form of simmering fantasy and a contagious passivity: Vernier regularly films the strikingly beautiful sunset over the sea as if to signify his desire to escape, never fulfilled. Centered on the ordinary people who otherwise seem to exist as mere extensions of the wealthy in Monaco, Cent mille milliards finds meaning in circumstantial encounters. Superficiality and a kind of daily wonder coexist in this ghostlike version of Monaco, a sort of counter-image of that bustling, ostentatious non-lieu, a depersonalized playground for the wealthy. Vernier’s wonderful intuition is found in the restraint of his film, steering clear of facile irony or sarcastic social satire, and instead embracing the absurd life of the very rich with a form of tenderness: here, the gaze is never patronizing; curiosity drives the film forward. Afine learns that it is possible to have a human interaction where money plays no part—which is no small revelation for a member of a milieu so threatened by complacency.
My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine, 1955).
In the festival’s retrospective dedicated to the centenary of Columbia Pictures, Richard Quine’s masterful musical My Sister Eileen (1955) follows two sisters, Eileen (Janet Leigh) and Ruth (Betty Garrett), who decamp from Ohio to New York to create themselves anew, aim to find success as an actress and writer respectively. While the distant horizon of Vernier’s film was the possibility of break away from any mercantile transaction, this classic Hollywood film links personal development to finding the perfect job. Given the colorful figures they encounter on their journey, My Sister Eileen stages the lively interplay between social strata. Newcomers and aspiring professionals alike cross paths with people whose careers are already established (among them, Jack Lemmon as your regular sleazy male editor of a big publication, who turns out to be a sensible individual, happy end oblige). Their meeting place? The shanty room that Eileen and Ruth are practically forced to rent upon arrival by a ferocious entrepreneur who is, in fact, not that unlikeable either. This, however, might be a trap: the musical unveils its escapist trajectory by making do with all kinds of toxic masculine behavior.
As respectable as they were back in Ohio, Eileen and Ruth have to start all over again in New York, enduring multiple rejections. Yet, returning home would also feel like a failure. With its exploration of possible artistic avenues available at that time, the film documents the profoundly corrupt power relations between men in positions of authority and aspiring women who are willing to take any chance—not out of naïveté, but out of sheer desperation. The sexist structural device that the film attempts to subvert until the end lies in the beauty of Eileen, which suddenly makes any male character around her more benevolent, while her sister Ruth has to overcome their innate condescendence by means of a spiritual, if resigned, attitude on life. By ultimately siding with her, while also treating Eileen without condescension, the film blossoms into a community portrait.
Top and bottom: My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine, 1955).
Their trajectory is tied up in the place they rent. Located in the sub-basement of an apartment building (the fact that you have to come down, not up, in order to reach it is the running gag of the film), this cramped room anticipates the great closing scene of Nanni Moretti’s Bianca (1984), in which the main character muses on the different pairs of shoes and legs he sees through his ankle-level window. The effect is less romantic here, though: on their very first night in town, as soon as they try to get some sleep, the sisters run into trouble. A passing truck splashes water as it passes by, soaking the interior of their place in the process. Noise is omnipresent. Two drunken lads decide to sing a serenade in honor of the young ladies. The scene of this agonizing first night goes on and on, with the film voluptuously adding insult to injury when the two sisters are greeted with leering stares due to their shady predecessors in the flat.
In spite of everything, this popular neighborhood is also a space for mutual aid. This downtown New York neighborhood, a melting pot of sorts, is also a minefield of cultural stereotypes (for one, the emphatic Greek landlord with a funny accent), yet nonetheless touching for the out-of-place feelings that the inhabitants share. For a last resort, it might be a good one: the wrestler who fell out of grace and seemed to be a nuisance becomes something of a protector for the two sisters. And motivational speeches from their landlord, a self-made guru, about overcoming adversity in New York actually distill a much-needed wisdom from an old emigré to younger ones. Home, the film teaches us, means more than domestic comfort: it is where you are not judged for who you are, instead finding solace in the feeling—be it a comically twisted one—of belonging.
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Alain Tanner, 1976).
The Streets I Walk (Fareyah Kaukab)
At the height of summer, the streets of Locarno—a town of 16,000 residents—begin to stir with life. Since 2016, the region has experienced a steady exodus due to a lack of economic growth and job opportunities; many aged 20-39 have moved away, leaving behind an aging community and a school-going population. In their place, wealthy Swiss Germans have been drawn to the area, establishing secondary residences or opening restaurants and cafés—incidentally, this is the reason why many establishments serve mediocre coffee. Yet each year, the city’s spirit is rekindled as the August heatwave announces the arrival of the annual event, and Locarno is adorned in yellow-and-black leopard print. The Locarno Film Festival, which just wrapped its 77th edition, beckons those who have left to return for summer jobs, joining residents, seasonal workers, and tourists as they cross paths with cinema enthusiasts, filmmakers, artists, and critics for ten days.
In Locarno, it is easy to forget you are in Switzerland. Nestled by the lake and flanked by the Alps, this city is cut off from the Swiss plateau and the rest of the country. The cobbled streets exude Mediterranean charm, and the Italian language fills the air. Yet, there is a touch of masquerade here: the streets are lined with ornamental, exotic Chinese windmill palm trees—imported to Ticino in the 19th century, they are now classified as invasive and banned from further planting. However, when I watch Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976) by Swiss French director Alain Tanner, recently restored in the festival’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma sidebar, I am instantly transported to the other end of the country: back to Geneva, the city where I grew up, and back in time to the aftermath of the events of May 1968, a sociocultural revolution that originated in neighboring France, where widespread strikes brought the country to a standstill.
The experiences of the film’s eight protagonists—four couples in their thirties, whose names all begin with “M”—reflect many of the issues at hand in the ’68 protests: the struggle of farmers, the democratization of the educational system, the questioning of Western values, the tension between individualism and communal living, the return to spirituality and rejection of consumerism, poverty among the elderly, the role of the mother figure, and unemployment. Characterized by their quick wit, the characters speak with a distinct French accent typical of the region. There is a pervasive sense of disillusionment among them, particularly in the ex-activist Max Satigny (Jean-Luc Bideau), who was directly involved in the protests.
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Alain Tanner, 1976).
The film opens in an apartment in the sprawling towers of Les Avanchets, a working-class complex built in the ’70s that houses around 5,000 residents. Loved by its inhabitants yet controversial in its symbolism, Les Avanchets was constructed as a satellite city and often unfairly associated with the French “banlieue”—characterized by high-rise buildings at the city’s edge, often poorly connected by public transportation, and primarily consisting of social housing and where crime rates are high. In reality, Les Avanchets is a vibrant and communal place, run by its residents and local associations; as of 2023, it has been included in the Federal Inventory of Heritage Sites of National Importance.
This opening scene illustrates how Tanner situates his protagonists within different regions of Geneva. The characters are humorously named after municipalities in transition, reflecting the high tension between industrial, agricultural, and urban interests. Mathieu (Rufus), an unemployed idealist with many children, lives with his wife, Mathilde (Myriam Boyer), in Les Avanchets. Their last name, Vernier, corresponds to the municipality where Les Avanchets is located. The farmers Marcel (Roger Jendly) and Marguerite (Dominique Labourier) Certoux reside in the more rural area of Perly-Certoux, where they are neighbors with the revolutionary teacher Marco Perly (Jacques Denis). The film not only highlights these geographical areas but also features the relentless roar of airplanes landing and taking off—a hallmark of Geneva’s sonic atmosphere, which makes me chuckle.
While biking to work, Mathieu imparts the desires of his eight-person group to his son Jonah; he describes how they’re meant to keep the group united by their desire to remake the world. Although he wonders whether things will improve for Jonah, his central message is clear: to keep trying until something changes.
And yet, overshadowing my comfort with familiar landscapes onscreen is the realization that Switzerland still grapples with the same issues: poverty among retirees, the tension between urban expansion and limited land, and the precarious existence of farmers. In the last six months, farmers in Geneva, with their livelihoods under threat, have protested for better selling prices, working conditions, and wages by turning signposts upside down—a scene that Tanner would surely work into his next film if he were here to see it.
Territory (Felix Scherrer, 2024).
Mathieu’s optimism is counterbalanced by Tanner’s frequent cuts away from his story to footage of Geneva in 1932, during the protests against the fascist National Union party. When overwhelmed police summoned the army, fresh recruits opened fire on the crowd, killing and injuring many. These images blur in my mind with scenes of riot police I saw in a different film that week, Territory (2024), the experimental documentary by Swiss-German director Felix Scherrer. I feel a cold sweat on my neck as Scherrer’s words echo in my head: “Rubber buckshot is non-lethal or less-lethal ammunition primarily used to deter danger. Banned in most European states. In Zurich, a hand with a wedding ring pulls the trigger…”
It’s 2024, and we’re in Zurich. The neighborhood where I lived for ten years appears on the screen, where a now-familiar scene unfolds of police vans and men in full riot gear. Over the past year, growing unrest among the middle class has led to frequent protests against fascism, capitalism, global wars, housing prices, Labor Day, anti-abortion laws, and feminist strikes, to name a few.
Scherrer’s voice solemnly narrates a story with three distinct layers in Swiss German: the investigation into the possible illegal retention of his mugshot by the police—an accusation that warrants an automatic deflective response, “We are not in America”—his personal struggles with depression and the challenges of managing everyday tasks like paying bills and handling health insurance, and the omnipresence of police and the excessive use of force in Zurich, where architecture and authority are intertwined, underscored by shots of the city’s new 750-million-Swiss-franc police headquarters.
Scherrer says toward the end of the film that his anger dissipates with the blue sky and his girlfriend’s presence. I wonder if mine might also fade as I step into a world of smiling faces, invasive palm trees, and the shallow veneer of liberalism on display at Locarno. But then I overhear the older Swiss-German gentleman sitting next to me say condescendingly, “Zurich, youth, pfff.” It’s 2024. Jonah would have been 49 this year.
Freak (Claire Barnett, 2024).
Old Strains (Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer)
Film is old, but so is video. At Locarno, where each screening is preceded by a bumper that reads “CINEMA FOREVER,” there is a pronounced concern about what cinema is today (as seen in Cineasti del Presente, a program that prioritizes first and second features by emerging filmmakers) and what it’ll become tomorrow (at Pardi di Domani, a section dedicated to “mapping out the possible pathways the cinema of the future might take” through a diverse selection of shorts and featurettes). Over the last decade, the festival has gained a reputation for championing the filmmakers of the future, awarding titles like Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge (2016) and Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023).
While Williams made a splash at last year’s festival for his innovative use of a 360-degree camera to shoot The Human Surge 3 (2023) and Jude incorporated original TikToks into his aforementioned Special Jury Prize Winner, many of this year’s selections display a reliance on increasingly archaic cameras. As more millennial filmmakers make their claims as to what the future of cinema can be and what it should look like, the chromatic fuzziness of prosumer video-cameras from the aughts has become charged with a new aesthetic valence. Far gone are the days when video-based feature films were considered “shit,” “poorly executed,” or “badly wrong.” Now, films like Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s New Strains (2022), as well as Martha Mechow’s more recent Losing Faith (2023), have been praised for their “inventive use of vintage lo-fi video technology” and “roving handheld camera,” respectively. The fact that the former premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the latter at FIDMarseille International Film Festival attest to a growing endearment with consumer-grade video cameras on the festival circuit.
Freak (Claire Barnett, 2024).
Claire Barnett’s short film Freak (2024) was shot using Hi-8 tapes and awarded a Special Mention in the International Competition for Pardi di Domani. The film centers on Lainey (Nancy McArthur), who is celebrating her birthday with her partner (Olivier Demers) at her parents’ home. It is shot from the perspective of Lainey’s partner and takes place in her childhood bedroom, which quickly becomes the backdrop for a tense conversation about sex and identity, evoking the spirit of mumblecore, after it’s revealed that Lainey’s parents are devout Catholics and her partner has never felt comfortable in their presence. While mumblecore filmmakers relied on similar digital cinematography because of the equipment options available to them, Barnett’s use of a Hi-8 camcorder is an aesthetic choice—after all, it would probably be more convenient to shoot on a smartphone or a newer consumer digital camera. And, while mumblecore’s commentary on sex often reflected long-standing disillusionments among hetero couples, Freak explores the dynamics of a queer relationship navigating the expectations of a conservative household; it is a film about how a partnership can be reimagined, not about how its existing paradigms are meant to be replicated.
A simple interlude that toys with perspective is key to Freak’s concerns. Midway through the short, the visiting partner sets their camera aside, but it keeps recording. As the couple talk through their sexual frustrations with one another, the lens of the camera—pressed against a set of sheets—becomes consumed by colorful prisms. As the argument swells, the light patterns on view expand until they take over the entire frame. Then, the film cuts and returns to a tender medium shot, nestled in the warmth of its Hi8 definition. Barnett transforms her turbulent frame into a blissful one by playing with how light is captured on Hi-8: the closer she gets, the noisier things look; the farther away the camera is, the more hazy and relaxed her view becomes—such are the swells of home life as seen from a home-video camera.
Eight Postcards from Utopia (Radu Jude and Christian Ferenz-Flatz, 2024).
A similar effect is on display in Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz’s Eight Postcards from Utopia (2024). The 71-minute collection of post-socialist Romanian advertisements features plenty of low-resolution footage, with waves of color bleeding and hyper-saturation emphasizing its semiotic analysis of a country caught in the midst of a slow economic and political transition. The fact that Jude and Ferencz-Flatz had to dig through YouTube, as well as contact amateur collectors who have preserved these commercials in whichever way they could—hence the film’s erratic shifts in color and resolution—points to how the film’s contents are part and parcel of a cultural moment wished to be forgotten in Romania. The same goes for the aesthetic choices on display throughout the film—a strange sampling of Romania-does-American-consumerism while working off shoestring budgets.
As a follow-up to his film about how the apocalypse is imminent, if not already in motion, Eight Postcards from Utopia and its bonanza of distorted media from the past is a welcome addition to Jude’s ongoing critique of late capitalism. The film’s final postcard, titled “The Green Apocalypse,” features prescient commentary on climate change. Its most damning ad sees a city flooded by a green blob of CGI; here, the video demonstrates an awareness about Romania setting itself on a dangerous path by embracing capitalism while evincing the undeniably gross aesthetics of its new order. As in this ad, Jude and Ferencz-Flatz point to the undeniable marriage between cheap commercials and a depreciating culture throughout their film, tracing worsening standards of craft throughout a period that was meant to welcome higher standards of living.
Foul Evil Deeds (Richard Hunter, 2024).
Perhaps the connection between degraded aesthetics and a deteriorating cultural landscape explains Richard Hunter’s decision to shoot Foul Evil Deeds (2024) on MiniDV using a video camera from 1993. His dark comedy, which cuts between different groups of people whose skewed sense of morality leads them to commit everything from risqué sex to murder, is composed of a series of almost-static shots. This fixedness, which suggests surveillance aesthetics, combined with the film’s blown-up, pixelated look evokes the early work of Michael Haneke, where evil was always the natural symptom of a society built on the saturation of images and image-capture. “I wanted an inevitableness to it,” Hunter told Variety about his cinematography. And he got it. After all, it’s inevitable that a generation that grew up on the dissemination of previously unseen realities filmed on early digital cameras—whether on YouTube, compilation shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos, or news channels—returns to interrogate its introduction to the world of images and the culture that produced it. Now, the daily production of images has entered a previously unbelievable dimension where craft and intention no longer matter, when every image, ever-amenable to manipulation, has lost an indexical connection to the present. Hunter’s film traffics in total ambivalence, but unlike Haneke, does not expound on the connection between its camera and the evil it observes throughout its several storylines. It’s as though these video cameras, having outlived their moment, have shed their original connotations of surveillance and voyeurism; they’ve become nothing more than a mode of capture, purely textural, beyond good and evil.
WAShhh (Mickey Lai, 2024).
At Home in the Unhomely (Sasha Han)
A proliferation of films at Locarno were devoted to portrayals of youth: Victor writes about the hostile social climates they must navigate, Fareyah notes their particular mode of aimless wandering, and Nico asks if younger filmmakers’ ambivalent nihilism toward images has led them to reach for analog tech. Despite exaltations of youth as a time of sprawling potential and meteoric growth, many of these characters find that the world was not designed to accommodate their desires for self-actualization, nor any hope for radical change.
At this realization, the eerie sensation of the unheimlich—the unsettling feeling of what was once inviting turned “unhomely,” even hostile—strikes, in line with F. W. J. Schelling’s interpretation of it as “the name for everything that ought to have remained […] hidden and secret and has become visible.” Without refuge, the ensuing dissociation and alienation from the world provokes a retreat into the self to test the possibility of engaging with the world on one’s own terms. It seems to me that the gathering of strangers in cinemas is often predicated on a similar kind of disappointment with reality; a withdrawal from a harsh world to enter into one of images ripe with subliminal, aspirational propositions.
WAShhh (Mickey Lai, 2024).
Based on the filmmaker’s own experience as a teenager in the Malaysian National Service, Mickey Lai’s Pardi di Domani-winning short film WAShhh (2024) arrives amid an ongoing movement to end period-shaming in Malaysia and examines the power structures that enabled such practices to take root. Where fellow Malaysian Amanda Nell Eu chose to engage with the same subject matter through horror in her debut feature Tiger Stripes (2023), WAShhh is rooted in social realism: a multi-racial group of girls at a National Service training camp are woken up in the middle of the night and accused of causing the spiritual possession of another conscript by not washing their single-use pads. Though ordered to inspect waste bins as punishment, the girls linger at the entrance before a conscript named Ekin takes it upon herself to represent and defend the hygiene of the Malays—immediately drawing racial lines that pit them against the others. Their officer’s reappearance puts an end to this interlude, as she tasks them all with searching for soiled pads and washing them—a gruesome, twisted way of forging friendship and camaraderie among youths across races and religions.
The leader of the group, Hui, bears the brunt of the humiliating task. Under the watchful eye of the officer, it’s Hui who makes the first move to inspect the soiled pads; she is verbally shamed for dishonesty after she attempts to hide the soiled pads she finds to protect the others. When a fellow trainee faints, Hui takes matters into her own hands and sequesters herself in a stall. There, she thrusts the stack of bloodied pads she found into a pail of water, punching her bare hands into the water before stomping the rags out with her boots. After, she furiously scrubs her hands clean; in the film’s black-and-white scheme, the gray grime that remains on her nails is indistinguishable from the color of their skin and blood. She and her company have inadvertently become the abject waste that was supposed to be cast out. Although the film ends with isolated close-ups of Ekin and Hui suggesting the irreconcilability of their friendship, the fact that all skin colors are rendered in grayscale throughout the film is an assertion of the fundamental humanity and equality of the girls.
Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing, 2024).
In conversation about Youth (Spring) (2023), Wang Bing told Film Comment that he wanted to “reclaim” the popular conception of youth in China, where the term was used to describe the revolutionary spirit in the mid-20th century. Following the light-heartedness of spring, Youth (Hard Times) (2024) stages how each individual’s ability chafes against the lack of grace in a market economy. At one point, a young woman is belatedly informed she has sewn her pile of clothes all wrong and will likely not be remunerated for days of work. Her failure at work seems to seep into other aspects of life: in the following sequence, she offers gifts of foodstuffs to her uncle, but he violently rejects them as if they were themselves damaged. Deflated, she watches his car drive away as the pile of gifts sits thoughtlessly discarded on the side of the road. Elsewhere in the film, a young man attempts to negotiate a minimum sum of wages after losing the workbook tracking his hours goes missing, and he is ultimately rebuffed. At dinner, he avoids his friends and dines alone, then vanishes from the film. Where his bosses had insisted he provide proof of his value to the production line, Wang’s camera instead observes the young man from a distance, allowing him to decide how much he wants to disclose to—or withhold from—the camera. In so doing, the film simultaneously allows the audience to contemplate his state of mind while affirming his right to an existence outside of the productive labor demanded by the factory and the performance of failure for an audience. Wrapping up a year of hard work at the factory, one of the workers laments their lost youth on a guitar: “I want to know, aren’t we young anymore?” It follows that the film’s Chinese title, “hard times” translates to 苦 (kǔ), bitterness. In turn, “ku” serves as a homonym for 哭 (kū), as in tears. Together, they form the bitterness that lingers at the back of the throat in a way that never really goes away, even after we reach adulthood.
At the start of Virgil Vernier’s Cent mille milliards, a girl recites a fairy tale: “The giant feared nothing. He was so strong he destroyed everything in his path… He was going to conquer the world.” Far from nursing destructive tendencies, the central giant of the film, Afine, is somewhat withdrawn, alienated from the opulence of Monaco: while his group of friends seems financially empowered to travel, he is left alone in a city where he struggles to pay rent despite working through the holidays. Immobilized by an inexplicable inertia that makes him increasingly ambivalent towards his escort work, Afine encounters Julia, a child who is similarly, if only temporarily, abandoned, having been left in the care of strangers by her parents, who are both wealthy developers. Their burgeoning friendship enables him to seek out his own path. While his friends return to berate him for not taking advantage of his youth to generate more income, Julia shares her made-up fantasies with Afine, inadvertently offering him a means to escape into himself as she does in her stories. In the end, as Afine strides through the city, his silhouette cutting a giant and solitary profile across the luxurious landscape, he walks himself out of frame and seemingly retreats into an AI-generated fortress to sufficiently break away from his present precarity—and, perhaps, to rest in the languor of a mirage.
More from the Locarno Critics Academy:
Cinema Embodied: What happens to the body at a film festival? A journey into the subconscious, sleeping, and smoking.
Just the Same but Brand New: A consideration of the filmmakers of the present through the moonglow of the retrospective.