The Brooklyn Rail

In a small green parklet on the edge of Lake Maggiore there is a two-room casino. Without much in the way of signage, this casino shares its building with a theater, where the festival conducts their afternoon press screenings the day before a film’s world premiere. The entrance to the white marble casino is marked by an opaque single automatic door coated in black and purple velvet. A woman with a tight blonde bun peers up from a desk behind a layer of plexiglass, asking for identification. As festival goers jostle about in between screenings, storming the bathrooms in ninety-minute increments, the casino sees almost no traffic. In the two dark windowless rooms, a handful of people sit alone or in pairs, dragging on vending machine cigarettes bought at the building’s entrance, staring down the barrel of a slot machine and pressing play again.

And it’s here that I write to you, in the smoking section of Casinò Locarno, trading one quiet black room for another, halfway through a staring contest with the golden glow of the Swiss slot machine, after my thirty-first feature film screening at the 78th Locarno Film Festival. I watch the glassy roll of another round of the slots reflected in the eyes of the woman next to me. At a festival like Locarno, which prides itself on being the only European film festival for the real cinephiles—destinations like Cannes or Venice are far too commercially-minded, even if there are a handful of repeat titles—filmgoing can be a lot like gambling: risks are taken, and they don’t always pay off, but the parties involved often find their thrills in the gesture rather than the potential outcome. At Locarno, a big-budget film is almost always an ominous indication, and experimentation in film form can sometimes prove to be overrated (as I type, I feel a rumble underneath my feet—must be Jean-Luc Godard rolling over in his grave). Like gambling, at Locarno, filmgoing can sometimes be an exquisite and lonely experience, but this loneliness can be part of its pleasure. The three films to follow are the jackpots of this year’s festival—beautiful, strange, experimental, unexpected.

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If the larger commercial projects of today’s auteurs can be characterized by their stubborn insistence on shooting on amber-tinted celluloid, Dry Leaf serves as an experiment in what feeling the humble pixel can provoke in its audiences. The third feature of Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze, the making of the film was as much a family affair as the narrative: Giorgi, Koberidze’s brother, composed the soundtrack to the film, and the Koberidzes’ father, David, stars as Irakli, a soft-spoken man entering the later years of middle age.

The plot is intentionally skeletal with wide expanses, mirroring the Georgian landscapes that dominate the runtime. Irakli receives a letter from his daughter, Lisa, informing him that she has left town for some time and asking him not to come looking for her. Ignoring her wishes and believing her to be out photographing the abandoned soccer fields that dot the Georgian countryside, Irakli sets off on an open-ended road trip to find her with her best friend, Levani, who lives as an invisible person. (This invisibility is acknowledged explicitly at the outset of the film; Levani has a voice and apparently a tactile presence, but Koberidze communicates where he is by pointing the camera at an empty carseat or a mid-range landscape as a disembodied voice cuts through the image.) Set to a minimal synth-heavy soundtrack, Irakli and Levani drive on the gravel roads carved out of the mountainside. When they see a football field, they stop and ask those loitering—some of whom are invisible like Levani—if they’ve seen Lisa. The answer is usually no. There’s a shrug of the shoulders and they continue along.

Shot entirely on a Sony Ericsson flip phone, which goes for about forty dollars on eBay, the film runs over three hours long at around 144p; owing to the compact bit rate, the film image appears to gently pulse every few seconds. Once your eyes adjust, the visual information lost in the camera quality doesn’t seem like much of a tragedy anymore. On the contrary, the wide bounds of each pixelated cell lend themselves to abstraction. Soap suds sliding down a windshield, backlit by weak sun, transform from indexical document to painterly gesture. Or overhead foliage turns into a rush of green and brown, seen from the back seat of a passing car. At the end of the film, Lisa submits the photos she’s taken to her boss at a sports magazine, who sends them to Irakli. He realizes that he and Levani travelled to nearly all of the same locations. Has Lisa seen these things too? Can this also be a form of togetherness?

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A film twenty years late, With Hasan in Gaza is composed entirely of MiniDV found footage, originally shot in 2001 for a debut feature that was never completed. At the time, Kamal Aljafari, a Palestinian filmmaker born in the Israeli city of Ramla, was studying film in Germany and shooting materials for what he envisioned to be his first film, loosely organized around his time in an Israeli prison as a teenager after he was accused of joining an anti-Israeli organization. With the help of Hasan, a local guide, Aljafari travelled down the coast of Gaza in search of Abdel Rahim, a memorable figure and role model from Aljafari’s time in captivity. Along the way, we encounter the people and landscapes that constituted Gaza at this time, in the midst of the Second Intifada.

For the vast majority of the world, time operates on a different register in the context of Gaza. Once an image of Gaza reaches an international audience, it is already a relic of the past.At every turn, Aljafari insists on the film as a historical document. Aljafari’s editing is minimal and low-intervention. The film consists mostly of extended uninterrupted shots of quotidian life, which includes anything from lateral tracking shots of empty beaches to records of casual exchanges of fire. As children beg Aljafari to appear in the frame, we’re presented with the anachronism of people freezing to have their photo taken.

In this film, to view an image of Gaza is always to see in multiples. We are presented with the real image of what has been captured by Aljafari’s camera, which shows recent destruction, and the film asks us to imagine what was once there. At the same time, we know that even the image presented to us has, in all likelihood, been obliterated by the current genocide happening in Gaza. With this film, Aljafari adds another entry to the growing list of Palestinian films committed to demonstrating proof of life through indexical images, almost as if the record of a face could protect from what has already happened and what more is to come.

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Whether we like it or not, things will happen in a young person’s life that bind them to that moment forever. Even as we get older, it will often feel like we are still stuck there, in that instant, long after everyone around us has decided that the event has ended and the days and weeks can resume again. Sophy Romvari’s debut feature film, for which she won the festival’s Swatch First Feature Award, begins by swiveling its head back towards a moment like this with startling veracity. The film unfolds from the perspective of Sasha, once as a girl and later as a young woman. From Sasha’s vantage, we view her Hungarian-Canadian family’s struggles with Jeremy, the teenaged half-brother who suffers from an undiagnosed (or undiagnosable) destructive behavioral pattern.

Blue Heron initially appears as a monument to description. The dappling of the sun on the floors of a family home, for instance, or the way an old swimsuit bunches and sags, assumes a certain significance that the attention of a camera bestows. This wouldn’t have been enough. Where another film may have carried on with the reconstruction of mildly remarkable events of a family history, Blue Heron cuts forward in time. Some decades later, we see Sasha as a young filmmaker in the throes of an attempt to resolve (or at least understand) her older brother’s particular problems as an adolescent. In Jeremy’s old beige windbreaker, we watch as the older Sasha journeys back into time, which takes the form of the ferry ride back to the old house. Posing as a social worker, she visits her family as they were then.

Things will happen in a young person’s life, and, as we get older, we will spend countless hours revisiting that moment, often wishing we were older or stronger when it had happened, as if we could have saved ourselves from it. Blue Heron never slopes into fantasy, but serves as a devastating corrective to the crush of the inevitable. What is salvaged by the elder Sasha’s visit to her childhood? What is made better by this? Romvari’s own position on the matter appears ambivalent but invested in the experiment. We would all do anything to have our brother back, even for a second. Fighting tears, Sasha reads a pre-written statement to her parents while she sits in their living room with them, describing what will befall them. The younger Sasha eavesdrops, an ear pressed to the closed door. “You will try many many times to keep him at home,” she tells them. “No one will understand, and it will only worsen.”

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Others Worth a Word

International audiences will surely find a moment or two in Radu Jude’s 170-minute Dracula that will prove titillating—the AI-generated Dracula porn sequence did the job for me; Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers (Tabi to Hibi), which was awarded the festival’s top prize, pulses with the strange humor of total loneliness, when you find yourself up a mountain in a snowstorm looking for the worst and emptiest hotel in town and happen upon a new friend, kind of; frequent Miguel Gomes collaborator Maureen Fazendeiro’s As Estações is a sort of experiment into “vertical” filmmaking as Maya Deren would put it, when a director opts to dive into a moment and dig around; White Snail, Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s first full-length narrative film, contains some of the most naturalistic and affectively charged acting performances of the festival, starring Marya Imbro as Masha, a Belarusian model-in-training obsessed with death, and Mikhail Senkov as Misha, the mortician-cum-painter tatted up to the gills, who indulges Masha’s desire to live in the world of the dead. Such a film prompts one to wonder what exactly a dead body is, and if film itself is not a dead body, too.