This year, the Locarno Film Festival (August 5–15) is honoring five stars, aged from their late forties to early seventies, with variously named awards, all celebrating their film careers and achievements over the years. On the opening night last Wednesday, Italian-American Isabella Rossellini was the first to be honored. She received the Excellence Award, a gesture recalling a journey that began 40 years ago with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
However, this generous recognition raises, in some cases, questions about its merit and timing, especially as some of the honorees are still at a professional age that is assumed to be at its peak, making the haste to grant them honorary awards a debatable matter. Nevertheless, it is hard to dispute the merit of some of these names, notably the highly talented Franco-Belgian Virginie Efira, who shared the Best Actress award at the last Cannes Festival and remarked, with some surprise and frankness, that this was her first time receiving such an award.
Among the honorees were also Italian Asia Argento and American Zoe Saldaña, in a session where Locarno seemed keen on honoring names that have established their presence in cinema, as well as others still on their path to doing so.
Poster of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.
Upon receiving her award, Rossellini appeared moved and said, “I am overwhelmed to be in the same ranks as my father and older brother Renzo.” Her father, director Roberto Rossellini, a pioneer of “Italian Neorealism,” won an award in Locarno 78 years ago for Germany Year Zero. In a conversation with the audience, the actress, who married Martin Scorsese and had a romantic relationship with David Lynch, revealed that she never dreamed of becoming an actress as a child and used to accompany her mother, Ingrid Bergman, to film sets. When she was fourteen, her father gifted her the book King Solomon’s Ring by ethologist Konrad Lorenz, sparking a passion for the science of animal behavior that remains alive today.
Among her notable statements to the press, Rossellini mentioned Robert Redford, who suggested that she make very short films, each no more than two minutes long. “An idea akin to asking a novelist to write a book no longer than a hundred pages,” she said. However, this limitation soon turned into a space for creativity, later leading to Green Porno, a series about the animal world and its sexual behaviors, which she found to be a witty and intelligent way to combine knowledge with cinema.
Regarding her work as an actress, Rossellini says, “The script is a signal to the film, not the film itself.” She believes that an actor must understand the director’s vision and always be ready to adapt to unexpected developments during shooting.
Speaking of David Lynch, with whom her name is particularly associated through Blue Velvet, she said: “He found it difficult to express himself in words, but he could convey what he wanted with his eyes.” She recounted how Lynch gave her, to help her embody the character of Dorothy Vallens, unusual but inspiring directions, among them saying to her: “Here come the clouds,” referring to the impending state of anxiety and fear he wanted her character to embody.
With The Green Eyes, placing the tragedy of asylum at its heart, Locarno opened its 79th edition. The film, the second work by French duo Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, follows a family facing deportation back to the country they fled after finding, in the southwest of France, a refuge they thought might offer them some stability.
However, the rejection of their asylum application brings fear to the forefront once again, pushing Nour, the child bearing the trauma more than anyone, into complete withdrawal from reality and into a deep sleep known as “resignation syndrome,” a rare phenomenon particularly observed among refugee children threatened with deportation.
'The Green Eyes' by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh.
The directors do not treat this phenomenon solely as a medical case but instead turn it into a cinematic entryway to explore the child’s world when reality becomes harsher than he can bear, blending the real with the dreamy and making sleep a haven from a world that is no longer safe. In this respect, the film echoes the duo’s concerns in their previous film, Gagarine, where imagination was a means of resisting exclusion and expulsion.
Choosing the Landes forests as the setting, the film takes on a quasi-mythical dimension, while research conducted by the directors with refugee children, doctors, and specialists in French asylum issues reveals a clear desire to construct a human story that transforms a major political issue into a personal experience, narrated through childhood’s helplessness. The political issue refuses to manifest itself in statistics and files, instead revealing itself through the body of a child unable to face the potential return to hell.
In its continuous and beloved oscillation between the present and past of cinema, the festival presented Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, the “rescued” film at Cannes in 1976, marking half a century since its screening. Regardless of the latent violence the film generates, it remains, for many of us, one of Scorsese’s most delicate and tender works.
The way the director looks at and deals with his characters is unparalleled: depicting the seventies with an open heart and taking us on a deep journey into paranoia and solitude amid a city that seems to reflect the disturbances of its characters. This is a film about salvation, made a few years before Raging Bull, about Travis Bickle’s remarkable descent into his psychological hell.
