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Locarno 2025 Review: “Le Lac”

_{© Casa Azul Films}

Frequent Godard-collaborater Fabrice Aragno’s debut feature Le Lac is a film to feel, rather than to follow like a conventional movie. Renouncing traditional dialogue and narrative progression, Aragno’s film is a sensorial experience that prioritizes touch, sound, and image over words. Over the course of five days, we accompany a couple, Anna (Clotilde Courau) and Vincent (Bernard Stamm), as they join a sailing race across a vast lake. What unfolds is an exploration of intimacy, nature, and the moments in which life itself feels most alive.

Locarno 2025 Review: “Mare’s Nest”

_{© Ben Rivers}

Ben Rivers’ Mare’s Nest is a thought-provoking and deeply imaginative post-apocalyptic eco-film that dares to put the future of humanity entirely in the hands of children. Featuring a cast composed exclusively of child actors, the film follows Moon Guo Barker, in an impressive performance as the character Moon, through a series of interconnected vignettes that meditate on memory, survival, and the persistence of culture after collapse.

Locarno 2025 Review: “Donkey Days”

_{© Family Affair Films, Junafilm, SWR/ARTE}

Dutch director Rosanne Pel’s sophomore feature Donkey Days, a Dutch-German co-production filmed in Germany with a predominantly German cast, is an intense and ambitious film that examines the tensions within an all-female family of three, using both realism and surreal elements. It examines the power dynamics between two adult sisters and their mother, demonstrating how conditional affection and criticism can define relationships over a lifetime. Pel balances a detailed depiction of domestic conflict with a confident and unique style, resulting in an upredictable, intense, and occasionally funny work.

Cannes 2025 Review: “Once Upon a Time in Gaza”

Set in Gaza in 2007, Once Upon a Time in Gaza is a complex genre-bending drama from the Nasser brothers that blurs the line between reality and cinema. Mixing noir, Western, and political satire, it follows the lives of Palestinians lived under the zionist blockade, where love and loyalty coexist with occupation and concept of martyrdom.

Cannes 2025 Review: “Nino”

Pauline Loques’ Nino unfolds in a compressed timeframe, yet feels expansive in the weight and emotions it carries. The film follows a young man whose life is suddenly redirected by a serious medical diagnosis, HPV-related cancer, depicting it through an educational, emotional, yet unsentimental angle. Loques keeps the camera close to her character, allowing us to read subtle shifts in performance. The pace is quick in terms of events, but the emotional register is slow and deliberate, leaving space for the audience to absorb the weight of the narrative.

Cannes 2025 Review: “Love Me Tender”

Anna Cazenave Cambet’s Love Me Tender is a radical portrait of the extent to which one’s attempt to free herself from heteronormativity is punished by society. Drawn from Clémentine Autain’s autobiography, it holds onto long stretches of the source text, letting the film’s voice stay personal, reflective, and grounded in lived detail. Vicky Krieps empowers the masterfully written screenplay with a transformative, unshowy performance that registers every shift in power and loss.

Cannes 2025 Review: “Reedland”

_{© Viking Film}

Reedland by Sven Bresser depicts contemporary rural Dutch life, where daily farming rituals collide with global pressures, family bonds, resulting in moral unease. Through striking imagery and evocative sound design, the film explores how tradition, isolation, and disruption shape the life of a solitary farmer in the reed fields.

Visions du Réel 2025 Review: “Shifting Baselines”

Shifting Baselines by Julien Elie is a visually stunning, dystopian-like documentary that examines the environmental and human consequences of industrial development in Boca Chica, Texas. The arrival of SpaceX’s Starbase facility has altered the landscape and reshaped the daily lives of the people living nearby. Elie constructs his film with an assured holistic vision, letting both architecture, people involved, and nature tell the story.

Visions du Réel 2025 Review: “To the West, in Zapata”

TTo the West in Zapata by David Beltrán i Marí is a contemplative, COVID-era work set against the remote backdrop of Cuba’s Zapata Swamp. It follows a crocodile hunter named Landi and his wife, Mercedes, who remains at home caring for their autistic son while Landi spends long stretches deep in the wetlands. Beltrán i Marí explores isolation, survival, and the rhythms of domestic and environmental life shaped by absence and routine.

Visions du Réel 2025 Review: “Gen_”

In Gen_, director Gianluca Matarrese creates an intimate and layered portrait of Dr. Bini, an Italian fertility specialist whose clinic becomes a meeting point for a diverse range of patients. Cisgender men with fertility struggles, gay couples pursuing parenthood, trans people receiving hormone treatments, and people questioning their own gender identity all pass through his doors. The film moves through these encounters, observing with sensitivity and without imposing a fixed viewpoint.