Locarno First Look Lineup: Six Spanish Features Unveiled for Swiss Fests Work-in-Progress S

Locarno has unveiled the half-dozen titles set to screen in this year’s 13th edition of its First Look sidebar, spotlighting works in progress. Each year, Locarno chooses one country to feature in the First Look section, and 2024 is Spain’s turn.

This year’s call for projects received 40 submissions, with a first pre-selection made by a committee that included Xavier Garcia Puerto (Tallinn Back Nights Festival/REC – International Festival of Cinema in Tarragona), Susana Santos Rodriguez (IndieLisboa/IFFR) and Cecilia Barrionuevo (ECAM – Escuela de Cinematografía y Audiovisual de Madrid).

Locarno’s First Look competition jury is comprised of the Artistic Director of Venice’s International Film Critics’ Week Beatrice Fiorentino, Istanbul Film Festival director Kerem Ayan and Programmer for the International Film Festival Rotterdam Mercedes Martínez-Abarca.

In addition to cash and service prizes valued at tens of thousands of euros, First Look will offer a platform for producers to present their films to potential sales and distribution partners in person at the Cinema Rialto and on the Locarno Pro Online digital library, available to accredited industry professionals.

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This year’s First Look is produced in partnership with ICAA, the Spanish Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts, and ICEX Spain Trade & Investment.

The Locarno Film Festival will run over August 9-11.

“L’Aguait” (“The Lookout”), Marc Ortiz (TV ON Producciones, Admirable Films, Lamalanga Produccions Audiovisuals)

Festival Synopsis: Teresa Pla, an intersex child assigned female at birth, struggles to be recognized as a man within the archaic Spanish society of the beginning and middle of the 20th century while he is persecuted by guerrillas, bandits and the Guardia Civil.

According to producer Paloma Mora, “The story is based on the real life of Florencio Plá Meseguer, deeply rooted in the director’s childhood. It’s a story set a hundred years ago with a topic and concept that could not be more up-to-date: Identity. The film is led by actor Pablo Molinero with a very personal touch from the director who has references from arthouse cinema such as Lisandro Alonso and Béla Tarr.”

“Bodegón con fantasmas” (“Still Life With Ghosts”), Enrique Buleo (Quatre Films Audiovisuales, Cuidado con el perro, This and That, Sideral)

Festival Synopsis: Distressed by the troubles and difficulties of life and death, ghosts and humans of the small town of La Mancha will do the impossible to put an end to their problems and will not hesitate to carry out extreme and desperate plans to achieve it.

“Enrique has created a tender body of work, in which each entry is an exercise in imagination, where the precision of his frames, a particular cadence and tempo and a sense of humor stand out,” producer Alejandra Mora tells Variety. “He dares to give a twist to death and pre-established values, introducing his characters into muddy terrain, from which they will find it difficult to escape and through which the spectator will suffer many emotions. All of this is set in a rural and marginal environment in the deep Spain, La Mancha, where Buleo himself was born, which is treated with respect and a deep humanism. A free and creative film, brave and grotesque, far from fashions and formulas.”

“Dream of Another Summer,” Irene Bartolomé (Colibrí Studio, I.B. Films, The Attic Productions)

Festival Synopsis: ‘Dream of Another Summer’ tells the story of the encounter between a woman collapsing and a city in ruins in order to explore how the spaces we inhabit relate to us and to reflect on the mortality and survival of a city.

Bartolomé tells Variety, “This film could be seen as an intimate thriller, a woman in crisis in a city in crisis, but also a film about a couple’s relationship. However, unlike conventional couples, this one is formed by a woman and a city, Beirut. The woman is lost in a city that is going through an economic crisis and trying to reconstruct itself after the destruction of the 4th of August explosion. Yet, one of the most distinctive elements in this film is that we will almost never see nor hear the main character. The real protagonist, the audience, will be her eyes and ears. They will live what she lives.”

“Mares (Mums),” Ariadna Seuba (Polar Star Films, Intactes Films)

Festival Synopsis: “Mares” takes the audience on an intimate and emotionally charged journey with director Ari (32) and her partner Anna (41), who want to have a child together. Anna is the first to begin assisted reproduction, whilst Ariadna captures every step with her camera.

“Mums follows my partner Anna and me as we go through some of the best and worst times in our lives,” Seuba explains. “I wanted to tell this story from the inside, so I turned our home into a film set and recorded over five hundred hours over the course of four years. The result is an intimate portrait of our life as a couple, capturing the emotional journey of trying to get pregnant.”

“Prefiro condenarme,” Margarita Ledo-Andión (Nós Produtora Cinematográfica Galega)

Festival Synopsis: 1972: The Ecclesiastical Court of Santiago de Compostela convicted Sagrario Fra, a shellfish harvester in Ferrol, for committing adultery. At the time, many women were being imprisoned or locked up in a mental hospital for what is considered a female-specific criminal act. But Sagrario Fra experiences love as insubordination. Like the birds flying between heaven and earth, Antigone is latent in Sagrario.

“Based on a story of illicit love during the Francoist dictatorship, this is the history of a woman who resists accepting the patriarchal norms and her predetermined destiny,” the director elaborates. “She is one of those that fight for rights not yet formally written and who demonstrate in their resistance that nothing should ever be given up as lost.”

“Río abajo, un tigre” (“Downriver, a Tiger”), Víctor Diago (Boogaloo Films)

Festival Synopsis: Júlia fled to Glasgow to start anew, but years later, she’s stuck. By day, she pursues photography; by night, she washes dishes. One afternoon, while photographing pedestrians, her eyes begin to fail. As illness spreads, Júlia delves into her past and that of the city, recalling a mysterious group that retrieved objects from the river, and Shubham, an Indian boy who, like her, came here for a new beginning.

“‘Downriver, a Tiger’ is a self-funded film, made with freedom and radicalness on the margins of the industry, built as a fable to talk about migration and its melancholy through the love story of two strangers,” explains producer Montse Pujol Solá. “The film mixes fiction and documentary-style filmmaking with archive material from the National Library of Scotland to bear humble testimony of all the migrants and workers who built post-industrial cities like Glasgow.”

Prizes at this year’s First Look include the Antaviana Films First Look Award covering post-production services up to €50,000; an award by post-production company Laserfilm cine y vídeo worth €5,000, which can, for example, be spent on subtitles, audio descriptions, spotting lists, transcriptions or a DCP; the Music Library &SFX/Acorde Award worth €45,000 in music supervision services at Music Library &SFX’s labs; an award by leading industry magazine Le Film Français Award worth €5,600 of advertising space; and the Jannuzzi Smith Award, which consists of the design of an international poster worth €10,000.

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Billy Koelling

Update: 2024-08-05

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