Memory is a funny thing. It can form and unwind us, ground and unmoor us. It can also trick us, probably because it’s so aligned with the fluidity of time. In this latest Locarno dispatch, there are three films that consider the effect of time and memory as a creative tool, a language, and a method for human connection. And, in a way, each movie is about how film can act as a tangible means to retain memory and control time.

Few directors working today are as perceptive about the toll of loneliness and the desire for human connection as Shô Miyake. In his idiosyncratic boxing movie “Small, Slow But Steady,” for instance, he follows a hearing-impaired female pugilist who finds support in her elderly trainer. In “All The Long Nights,” a woman battling PMS strikes an unlikely friendship with a man often stricken by panic attacks. His latest, “Tabi to Hibi,” aka “Two Seasons, Two Strangers,” which had its World Premiere in Locarno’s Concorso Internazionale section, winning the prestigious Pardo d’Oro (Golden Leopard), similarly finds him focusing on an isolated woman searching for the words that’ll help end her solitude. 

Based on Yoshiharu Tsuge’s manga Mr. Ben and his Igloo, A View of the Seaside, “Tabi to Hibi” also sees Miyake pulling off what’s become a magic trick for him: The first half of the film isn’t the primary narrative. In this case, Miyake makes that point quite literally. For the opening 45 minutes, we are watching a film within a film. It’s about Nagisa (Yumi Kawai) and Natsuo (Mansaku Takada), two lonely young people who quickly go from being strangers to finding solace in each other during their summertime dates at the beach. The vibrant photography of this paradisal seaside drapes every scene in hues of blue and green, while the editing remains meditative yet brisk. Miyake doesn’t hide that this movie isn’t real. He often cuts back to Li (a moving Shim Eun-kyung), the screenwriter, as she’s in the act of penning what we’re watching. But just when it feels like we’ve gotten the gist of this metatextual exercise, Miyake turns the film upside down.

The soulful second half of “Tabi to Hibi” moves away from the film-within-a-film device to focus on its devisor. We learn that Li took this screenwriting job for hire, and now she’s burned out and dealing with the aftermath of a sudden tragedy. She leaves the city for the snowbound woodland mountains (Miyake displays a wonderful sense of place in this setting), staying in a deserted inn operated by Benzo (a restrained Shinichi Tsutsumi), who, despite his gruff appearance, understands Li’s hard loneliness.  

There is a quiet kindness that arises from Li and Benzo’s friendship, made all the more potent by Miyake’s tonal discipline. This film neither takes a melodramatic turn nor runs headlong toward its unassuming, yet devastatingly poetic ending. It’s measured and attuned to two taciturn characters who hope they can still write the next chapter of their lives. By the time the ending sneaks up on you, you feel as though you’d like to spend three hours in this world. Because Miyake’s style is so refined, he now feels like the kind of comfort watch you need to remember the life that’s still waiting out there.     

In Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý’s sensorial documentary “Hair, Paper, Water…” or “Tóc, giấy và nước…,” an elderly woman living in a small Vietnamese village recounts how she was born in a cave, grew up there, and is now, for the first time, heading to Saigon to care for her new grandchild. This new child isn’t her first. In fact, she has several. She teaches many of them her language, Rục, which, like many native tongues around the world, needs the next generation to keep it alive. 

Observationally rich and overwhelmingly beautiful, the Cineasti del Presente winner “Hair, Paper, Water…” follows her pursuit with the kind of handmade intimacy that recalls Jonas Mekas. Graux and Quý, who previously co-directed the short “Porcupine” (2023), document her journey using a vintage Bolex camera and 16mm Kodak film. Often, the camera shakes and shimmies, not unlike a home movie. Quý also shares a built-in rapport with this woman—she was the subject of his pre-“Viet and Nam” film “The Tree House”—and is able to capture unassuming familial moments, such as the grandmother and her grandson sleeping in a rowboat or the bringing together of three sisters for a portrait. 

Similar to “The Tree House,” “Hair, Paper, Water…” is a film about remembrance. Because not only is she teaching her grandchildren the Rục language. She’s also teaching us. In the first third of this tight 71-minute film, she recites the names of animals and insects, sometimes playfully mimicking their sounds. In the next third, she explains landscapes and then the elements that sustain life. She also teaches us about the local medicinal plants, which can remedy anything from sprained joints to COVID. With these lessons also come moments of sensorial bliss: the sound of bats flapping, rain dripping, and trees falling, form the second language of her people.

On top of the environmental elements documented in “Hair, Paper, Water…,” Graux and Quý also make note of the economic inequality within Vietnam. There is a billboard that reads, “Reducing poverty is the responsibility and duty of the people themselves.” Many in the city are factory workers who aren’t earning a livable wage, relying on family help to subsist. In this way, “Hair, Paper, Water…” shows that even in a modern world, the knowledge of language and the sense of community that binds us to the past may ultimately guide us toward the future.        

In Naomi Kawase’s overworked existential drama “Yakushima’s Illusion,” Dr. Corry (Vicky Krieps), a French coordinator of pediatric heart transplants based in Japan, experiences loss in both her professional and personal life. The former is born from the many children she looks after who are awaiting an organ in a country like Japan that treats such procedures as culturally taboo. The latter occurs because of a whirlwind romance with the free-spirited photographer Jin (Kanichiro). Although both threads are intended to work in synergy, they often conflict with each other, with the grounded medical narrative ultimately prevailing. 

Kawase’s adept use of cameras and film stock often gets the best of her in “Yakushima’s Illusion,” making it one of those cases of ‘just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.’ The opening, for instance, is a flurry of nature montages—a well she will hit far too often in the non-linear film’s many transitions between narratives and years—that involve drones sweeping across seas and climbing over mountains. A backlit kiss between Corry and Jin punctuates the florid opening before launching us into a film that spontaneously careens through the events of the last three years: Corry meeting Jin during a nature retreat, their eventual relationship, and their aching breakup. All the while, Kawase switches from digital to film in a way that doesn’t ground us in Corry’s emotional tumult but zaps it of rhythm and feeling. 

Sometimes it’s as though Kawase is aware of the film’s romantic shortcomings, mostly because the film skirts around Jin being a Johatsu (people who purposely disappear from their lives). Instead, Kawase relies on flashbacks to fill in the blanks of two characters who appear symmetrical to each other in terms of their respective tragedies and longing for human connection, but are spiritually distinct. These moments of looking back, unfortunately, only bog down the film, causing Krieps to shoulder too heavy a load.    

Conversely, scenes relying on the pain of parents unable to protect their children from their hearts failing have a surer aim. Part of that is inherent; what person isn’t deeply affected by the sight of an anguished mother or father? The actors, some of whom are only appearing for one scene, and therefore must tap into complex emotions with little scene time to background those feelings, also have a strong hand in landing these moving movements. More importantly, Kawase’s direction becomes less expressive and more to the point, allowing the movie’s sense of grief and longing to organically take place.

When “Yakushima’s Illusion” isn’t dabbling in the metaphysical, it’s quite overwhelming. How can we face death? And how do we accept that we must live on when others have perished far before their time? “Yakushima’s Illusion” is best when confronting those difficult questions, which makes you wish it didn’t find the need to provide any answers.

The Locarno Film Festival never ceases to surprise me. The eclectic programming makes it so that you’re never seeing two films that are wholly alike. In this dispatch, for instance, are three works that couldn’t be more different: a moving coming-of-age film, a searing critique of AI, and a lighthearted throwback Western. And while I’m recommending all of these pictures to varying degrees, I’m not sure I’d recommend anyone watching them back-to-back-to-back for fear of experiencing too many extreme tonal whiplashes. The lone feature binding them all together, in fact, is their ambition within their respective sandboxes.    

There is a pulsating ache at the heart of writer/director Sophy Romvari’s assured feature debut “Blue Heron” that hits with such precision, it could break you open from the inside. See, there is a fine line between anger and regret, which can cause one to masquerade as the other. Romvari’s fractal film keenly actualizes the slide between both poles through an ingenious memory play structure and a startlingly raw vulnerability. The film, which is set to head to the Toronto International Film Festival next, isn’t just a highlight of Locarno’s Cineasti del Presente section. It’s also a film that so deftly wields the best qualities of cinema to shake tightened emotions, one can scarcely escape without exposing their own past personal pain.  

Romvari begins her film with a confession. “It’s true I spent most of my life being angry at him,” the narrator (Amy Zimmer) explains as she points her camera phone from a cliff down toward a car winding through a woodland road. “The older I get, the more I feel like I never even knew him at all.” Soon, we learn that this vehicle is occupied by a Canadian-Hungarian family, comprising three sons, a daughter, a mother (Iringó Réti), and a father (Ádám Tompa). The eldest son, Jeremy (Erik Beddoes), is usually moody and aloof. The father and mother often fret about Jeremy’s unruliness, which stems from a mental illness that no one can quite name. Although Sasha (Eylul Guven) is our protagonist, we’re not always looking at the world directly through her young perspective. Sometimes we see it from the dad’s camcorder or reflected in windows. The camera will sometimes drift and wander away through elaborate pans, maintaining a point of view that often recalls Max Ophüls, particularly during the opening scene of “The Earrings of Madame de…”

At first, it seems quite clear where Romvari’s film is heading, which could cause a glib viewer to hurriedly equate this intense coming-of-age film with works that blend memory and pain, like “Aftersun” or “All of Us Strangers.” But just as we feel like we’ve learned plenty about Jeremy’s rebelliousness and possible suicidal ideations, Romvari pulls the rug out from under us. The second half of “Blue Heron” becomes less narratively stable, nipping and tugging the past and the present together until they’re nearly indistinguishable.

Romvari’s documentary short, “Still Processing,” which examines the grief caused by the death of the filmmaker’s brothers, serves as a thematic precursor to “Blue Heron.” And yet, this film doesn’t suggest a reworking of formerly explored ground, but the capturing of further revelations mined from a greater passage of time. The documentary-inspired aesthetic language is similarly employed yet subverted, objective yet evocative. By the end, what’s found isn’t an understanding of what happened, but an acceptance of the person who lived it.         

I’m going to try to describe Radu Jude’s “Dracula” in the simplest way possible: It’s pretty fucking nuts. For one, if you’re arriving at his film expecting a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s material, well, I’m not sure why you’d expect that from the director who made “Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn.” Rather, the film serves as a continuation of the Romanian filmmaker’s Fake News-TikTok critique “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.” Like that film, the writer/director disavows good taste while interrogating politics, economics, history, and his local culture for a media studies treatise that leaves no one unscathed. Rather than using TikTok as his primary tool for satire, however, here Jude leans on generative AI. The move is a risky gambit, one that could either be lapped up by AI cultists or dismissed by ardent cinephiles. 

Jude, however, might not think he’s in any danger. After all, the joke is pretty self-evident: the film follows a director (Adonis Tanța) whose lack of talent causes him to turn to AI to manufacture a version of “Dracula” that’ll win him Hollywood adulation. Though there is an A-plot, which involves a late-night Romanian Dracula show starring an impotent actor (Gabriel Spahiu) and his vivacious Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia) that goes horribly wrong—there are also B thru Z plots too. These are inspired by the prompts the director asks AI to render. We jeer and we laugh as the computer doesn’t come remotely close to pulling off standard filmmaking techniques, tonal awareness, or even specific genres. When the director asks the DR. AI JUDDEX 0.0 to make a sexy lesbian vampire flick, it admits to not having functions for diversity because it was manufactured in the European market. At another point, he attempts to remake F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” only for the computer to reimagine the classic as commercials for vitamins, tourism, and porn. Late,r when he wants DR. AI JUDDEX 0.0 to make a silent film, only half the film is silent.   

None of the Draculas are played by the same person, the shots are sometimes out of focus, and the extras are so under-rendered they often appear as cardboard standees. Sometimes the film is overwhelmingly grotesque, especially whenever a flurry of generative AI stills flash past with the distastefulness of horseradish on cherry pie. The point is clear: Jude hates AI. And so he’s made an entire film to show just how bad it really is. 

Many will probably object to Jude’s lampoonish method because it might suggest to pro-AI people that it’s possible to make a three-hour film like Jude’s with the same technology. But even with “Dracula” possessing the hallmarks of Jude’s tonal approach: lots of sex (there’s one section where a farmer makes a crop of dicks), plenty of cursing, and knowingly uncouth humor—his more serious political arguments lack refinement, appearing to be lax and nearly unfinished. And maybe for this film, that’s a feature, not a glitch. Jude tried AI, and he made a worse film for it, which might be among the rare examples of a director taking several steps back to make a film that’ll be studied for decades. 

One of the odder films at Locarno might be Duwayne Dunham’s fantastical Western “Legend of the Happy Worker.” It’s a knowingly earnest, kitschy work whose cartoonish approach sticks out from the more experimental films being presented here. The quirky adventure adapted from the same-titled S.E. Feinberg play was produced by David Lynch, whose collaborations with Dunham included editing “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” as well as directing several episodes of “Twin Peaks.” While “Legend of the Happy Worker” doesn’t reach those heights, its playful mood and stilted aesthetic aren’t totally alien to “Twin Peaks” or Dunham’s prior feature directorial efforts like “Halloweentown” (if you squint, I promise there’s a through line there). 

The meandering mythical work concerns a digging town founded by the family of Goose (Thomas Haden Church), a resolute but even-keeled leader and cowboy who identifies the blissfully naive digger Joe (Josh Whitehouse) as someone who could potentially become a foreman to the area’s many laborers. Though these workers spend their days digging a hole for reasons we can’t fathom, they don’t appear to be aggrieved. They really love ploughing the earth. Their utopian existence is disrupted, however, by the return of the mean Clete (Colm Meaney), who wants to use tractors to dig deeper into the soil. It’s up to the kindhearted, wide-eyed Joe, Clete’s nephew, to stop him.

Dunham’s film is in a kind of grey area; it’s at once not as cute as the material suggests or as nightmarish as it could get. For every scene featuring a turtle race or shovel becoming a kind of Excalibur, there’s also cold-blooded murder. Joe’s wife Joanne (Megan Holder) is seriously underdeveloped, and the fable aspects are too obviously rendered to be wholly transportive. Nevertheless, Church is simply astounding, bringing an unlikely gravitas mixed with some quiet comedic timing for a bewitching quality. Whitehouse, whose performance is purposely grating, nimbly follows the arc of his character, becoming a quippy hero worth following. 

Even when “Legend of the Happy Worker” struggles, I found myself being somewhat forgiving. This kind of overly sentimental work told with a lighthearted touch was commonplace in the 1990s, particularly in kids’ sports movies like “Angels in the Outfield” or the Dunham-directed “Little Giants.” So it’s somewhat heartwarming to see a film like this out in the wild somewhere, even if the film itself isn’t as wild as the material promises it’ll be.      

It’s August, so the leopard is ready to roar again. In its 78th year, the Locarno Film Festival, located in Switzerland by the blissful Lake Maggiore, returns with a slate that’s as hot as the summer Swiss sun. It’ll be my second year attending the festival, which quickly shot to the top of my list of favorite film destinations after last year featured films from Radu Jude and Hong Sang-soo, and a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Columbia Pictures. It also introduced me to a picturesque town whose many river cobblestone streets and winding Lombard-style buildings converge on the Piazza Grande, an open-air square that hosts 8000-seat screenings.

Indeed, there is nothing better than stumbling out of a movie late at night, into the humid, steamy air, and seeing the glow of a screen bigger than most buildings lighting up the sky. 

This year, several titles and celebrations have already caught my eye. Here are just a few goodies that Locarno 2025 has to offer. 

A Tribute to Lucy Liu

Liu has spent the better part of three decades carving a place in Hollywood as a larger-than-life action hero. She first found success on “Ally McBeal,” where she gained Emmy and SAG nominations playing the fierce lawyer Ling Woo, before launching into movies like “Kill Bill,” “Charlie’s Angels,” and “Kung Fu Panda.” Now with “Rosemead,” an intimate drama that sees Liu playing an immigrant widow, Liu is approaching quieter roles. Not only will Erin Lin’s film have its international premiere at Locarno, Liu will also receive the festival’s lifetime achievement award. It’s a recognition that, considering Liu’s illustrious career, feels overdue. 

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960

Last year, Locarno’s Retrospettiva section paid tribute to Columbia Pictures. This year, it’s British postwar cinema. Curated by filmmaker and critic Ehsan Khoshbakht, the celebration will showcase 40 major classics and little-known rarities from the era’s most imperative stars and directors. Some of my personal favorites that’ll be screening include Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” Jules Dassin’s “Night and the City,” and David Lean’s “The Passionate Friends.” Some of the rarities I’m most looking forward to are George King’s “The Shop at Sly Corner,” Wendy Toye’s “The Stranger Left No Card,” Daniel Brit’s “The Three Weird Sisters,” and much more. This programme is so deep, it’s going to be hard to pull myself away to see any new movies. 

Concorso Internazionale

The festival’s main competition, which will award the Golden Leopard to the top film, is brimming with some intriguing works. For one, there’s Romanian auteur Radu Jude’s near-three-hour Dracula film. Conversely, Japanese master Naomi Kawase is back with “Yakushima’s Illusion.” It’s her first film since the melancholic drama “True Mothers,” and it stars Vicky Krieps.

Sho Miyake, who I personally believe is among Japan’s best underseen directors, also has “Two Seasons, Two Strangers,” starring Shim Eun-kyung. Also, Abdellatif Kechiche, the filmmaker behind “Blue is the Warmest Color,” will arrive in Locarno with the third installment in his Mektoub, My Love series, “Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due.” 

With these films and more, it’s already shaping up to be a deep competition. 

Keep One Eye Open

Up and down the lineup, there are a few other noteworthy mentions. Canadian director Sophy Romvari’s feature debut, “Blue Heron,” will have its world premiere at Locarno before heading to the Toronto International Film Festival. Considering several of her shorts have been featured on Criterion Channel, one wonders if her deeply personal coming-of-age story might be the breakout of the festival. 

Former David Lynch collaborator Duwayne Dunham—who served as editor on “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart”—also has a new film produced by Lynch himself: “Legend of the Happy Worker.” Starring Thomas Haden Church and Colm Meaney, this offbeat Western could have enough star power and passion to reach beyond Locarno, back to America. 

Finally, I have to shout out Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.” Yes, it’s an “old” title. Hence why it’s playing in the Histoire(s) du Cinéma as part of a tribute to Academy Award-winning costume designer Milena Canonero (“The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Barry Lyndon”), who is receiving the festival’s Vision Award. I just wanted to bring it up because Coppola was recently rushed to a hospital in Rome for a heart procedure. Though the auteur behind “Apocalypse Now” and “The Godfather” quickly announced he was fine, if you happen to be walking around the PalaCinema on August 10, then try to sneak in a watch of Coppola’s self-produced wild swing as it was meant to be seen, on a big screen surrounded by mostly Italian-speaking patrons.