Reviews

Locarno 2026 Review: “Revolutionaries Never Die”

Renowned Palestinian documentarian and archival researcher Mohanad Yaqubi’s newest documentary, Revolutionaries Never Die, finds its roots in an unanswered message. In 2018, Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab contacted Yaqubi about collaborating on a project. She died three months later, before he replied. Years afterward, working through 113 reels of Saab’s 16mm films, Yaqubi constructs the response he never sent. The result is a tribute to the revolutionary Lebanese filmmaker, her filmmaking, and a meditation on what it means to inherit another person’s images.

Locarno 2026 Review: “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming”

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There is a cruel irony at the center of Isabelle Stever and Anna Melikova’s newest film: just as co-protagonist Oleh begins to embrace his masculinity on his own terms, war arrives to prescribe him what being a man is supposed to mean. For Oleh (Markus Bright), a transgender man living in Ukraine with his girlfriend Olya (Tania Myronyshena), transition opens one future while Russia’s invasion violently closes another. Borders, military service, family expectations and even language begin attaching new restrictions and obligations to identities that had seemed possible to navigate by oneself.

Locarno 2026 Review: “In All My Journeys I Am Returning”

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In 1825, a young Swedish couple arrives in Colombia, chasing the promise of gold, carrying with them the hope that distance might be converted into fortune and exile into a new home. Manuel Ponce de León’s debut feature In All My Journeys I Am Returning takes this real historical migration as its starting point, but quickly loosens the boundaries of the period film to make room for poetic abstraction. The Colombia Karl and Petronella travel through is at once newly independent, politically unsettled and disconnected from chronology, a place where the nineteenth century can brush against the twentieth and where the poetry of a descendant not yet born can echo backward through time. What begins as an expedition into Antioquia gradually becomes a film about inheritance, displacement and the peculiar ways history refuses to remain in the past.

Cannes 2026 Queer Palm: Between Assimilation and Preserving Community (Club Kid, Elephants in the Fog, Dora)

_{© Raya Martigny & Édouard Richard / Queer Palm}

Each year at the Cannes Film Festival, the Queer Palm is awarded to recognize LGBTQIA+ cinema across the festival’s official and parallel sections. The 2026 selection, consisting of a record-breaking 21 feature nominees, highlights the importance of queer stories in cinema. In Marie Madeleine by Gessica Généus, religion, sex work, and homosexuality clash in Haiti. In Queer Palm winner Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun, the trashy slasher film genre of the 80s becomes a vehicle to rethink anti-trans scholarship through an examination of self-identification at the intersection of horror, sex and queerness. In Flesh and Fuel by Pierre Le Gall, the long-distance romance between two gay truckers is tested by the hardships of working-class labor. These films came together at Cannes to showcase current sociopolitcal concerns in global queer cinema.

Cannes 2026 Review: “Dua”

Blerta Basholli’s follow-up to her 2021 Sundance winner Hive, Dua, delivers a portrait of a teenage girl’s daily routine disrupted by the increasing marginalisation she experiences during the Kosovo War. The film is set in late 1990s Prishtina, where Kosovar Albanian families live under systemic violence and the constant threat of exile. Dua (Pinea Matoshi), thirteen, wants the ordinary freedoms of early adolescence. She wants to belong at school, to understand her changing body and to move through her city without fear.

IFFR 2026 Review: “Projecto Global”

_{© O Som e a Furia, Tarantula}

Projecto Global, directed by Portugese filmmaker Ivo M. Ferreira, positions itself as a political thriller in the tradition of Costa-Gavras, portraying conspiracy and systemic anger in both hectic and stylistically cool fashion. At its best, the film channels the atmosphere of this lineage effectively; at worst, it feels unsure of what, exactly, it wants to argue.

IFFR 2026 Review: “Yellow Cake”

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Yellow Cake is a bold yet uneven sophomore feature from Brazilian writer-director Tiago Melo, in which he blends eco-sci-fi, political satire and B-movie tropes. The film trakes place in the town of Picui, Brazil, rich with uranium, where a government-supported initiative promises to eradicate dengue fever by sterilising mosquitoes through ‘controlled’ radiation.

IFFR 2026 Review: “Butterfly”

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With Butterfly. her sophomore feature film, Itonje Søimer Guttormsen returns to the International FIlm Festival Rotterdam with something that initially feels like a radical departure from her debut, Gritt. The film opens with flashy camerawork and a hazy, nearly spiritual atmosphere, suggesting that Guttormsen is treading new waters through visual experimentation. Yet, as the story unfilds, the aesthetic wildness gradually gives way to a continuation of Guttormsen’s more recognizable style, albeit slightly less cohesive, as emotionally raw characters find themselves challenged by questions of identity and art.

Locarno 2025 Review: Sorella di Clausura

Ivana Mladenović’s Sorella di Clausura is a darkly comic portrait of obsession, delusion, and the strange collisions between celebrity culture and everyday survival. Featuring a fearless performance from Katia Pascariu as the unforgettable Stela. Around her orbit Boban, a former Yugoslav idol, long past his glory days, and Vera Pop, a hypersexual pop star who turns sex into commerce., the film builds its own mad energy from the very first moments. A bright red title card declares, “If you thought you were going to watch a film based on true events, you are wrong and possibly paranoid,” setting the tone for a story that oscillates between satire, melodrama, and tragic comedy. Adapted from Liliana Pelici’s autobiographical manuscript, the film reshapes her personal testimony into a wild narrative that keeps viewers laughing, cringing, and thinking in equal measure.

Locarno 2025 Review: “God Will Not Help”

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God Will Not Help, the sophomore feature from Croatian director Hana Jušić, is a poetic work on grief, faith, and the universal experiences of women within a patriarchal society. Led by powerful performances from its two stars Manuela Martelli as Teresa and Ana Marija Veselčić as Milena, the film explores how solidarity between the oppressed is able to form even in silence and cultural differences, and how it becomes their only shield against subjugation.