Locarno 2023

Locarno’s First Look programme of works-in-progress puts the UK in the spotlight in 2023 and one of the six new titles in the frame is All At Sea, the semi-autobiographical documentary of the late Mike Hodges, the 1960s Granada TV docmaker who went on to make fiction features as diverse as the seminal Get Carter and Flash Gordon. The documentary is produced by Liverpool-based Hurricane Films.

Gutweniger and Kofler’s new documentary, which world-premieres in Locarno Critics Week, observes the behind-the-scenes labour within Italy's Northern Adriatic coastal resorts, both in and out of season. The filmmakers are surprisingly formal in their approach, with their use of a static camera. “We wanted to stand still and watch,” Kofler says. “Everything was rushing and craziness but we wanted stay still in a certain way.”

UK docs-in-progress Mother Vera by Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson, and No Ifs Or Buts by Sarah Lewis, were lauded August 6 by the First Look jury, while Pas Ta Maman by Michèle Flury and produced by Felix Schreiber of Sommerhaus Filmproduktion won the Alphapanda Market Breakout Award of Locarno’s Alliance 4 Development platform.

In her debut feature doc shot over six years Eléonore Boissinot chronicles the lives of two Muslim sisters in Ahmedabad, a city within the Hindu-majority Indian state of Gujarat. What seems at first a domestic story of teenage frustration evolves into a political rites of passage as the girls come to understand their tragic past and how it was shaped, in 2002, by a sectarian massacre that claimed 69 lives, among them ten members of their own family. The director talks to BDE.