Lucrecia Martel, Mari Alessandrini, Miguel Gomes Win Big at Locarno Film Festival

Upcoming movies from two Argentine filmmakers, Lucrecia Martel’s “Chocobar” and Mari Alessandrini’s “Zahori,” won the top Pardo 2020 Awards at the Locarno Film Festival’s The Films After Tomorrow, its highest-profile competition, the festival announced Friday.

Of other major plaudits in The Films After Tomorrow, a section highlighting COVID-19-hit productions, “Savagery,” from Portugal’s Miguel Gomes, scooped the strand’s Special Jury Prize. Its prize for most innovative project went to “The Fabric of the Human Body,” from Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor.

The sometimes considerable cash prizes – Martel and Alessandrini’s Pardos for best international and Swiss projects respectively carry SFr 70,000 ($77,000) cash awards – went to movie projects that explore themes of race, or the malpractice of supposedly unimpeachable authority.

Lead produced by Argentina’s Rei Cine, “Chocobar,” a hybrid creative documentary, sees Martel double down on the historical and cultural context of the assassination in 2007 of Indigenous activist Javier Chocobar, which she attributes to “Argentine racism.” Zahori traces the unusual relationship struck on the Patagonian Steppe between a girl, aged 13, from Switzerland’s Ticino, and an aged Mapuche man.

Freely adapting – and surely diverging at times – from Euclides da Cunha’s novel, “Rebellion in the Backlands,” Gomes’ “Savagery” recounts the the slaughter in 1897 Brazil of the 15,000 mixed-race inhabitants of Canudos, victims of a religious cult, by soldiers of Brazil’s newly-created Brazilian Republic.

“The Fabric of the Human Body” is a doc feature on cutting-edge medicine’s dubious bio-ethics; Raphael Dubach and Mateo Ybarra’s “Lux,” which won a TV advertising campaign worth SFr100,000 ($110,000) from Swiss public broadcaster SRG SSR, is another doc feature, a deadpan comedy about a huge Swiss military exercise in 2019.

Top prizes in the Pardo di Domani, the Locarno Festival’s short film section and its main festival competition this year, went in the international section to “I Ran from It and Was Still in It,” in which L.A.-based filmmaker Darol Olu Kae examines the loss of his father and relocation of his children while painting a broader picture of race and family in the U.S.; and, in the Swiss section, to Jonas Ulrich’s “People on Saturday,” a take, via a series of droll vignettes, on how the Swiss send their Saturday afternoons. They are curious folk, Ulrich maintains.