Toxic (Akiplėša), the debut feature from Saulė Bliuvaitė, has won the 2024 Golden Leopard, the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival.
Toxic follows two teenage girls from a bleak industrial town who join an extreme local modelling school. Featuring a cast of non-actors, it was selected for Les Arcs work-in-progress programme in 2023, and was also a prize-winner at Meeting Point Vilnius this year.
Bendita Film Sales are handling sales. The film also won Locarno’s Swatch first feature award.
The Golden Leopard for best film includes a cash prize of CHF 75,000 ($86,650) to be shared equally between the film’s director and producer.
Kurdwin Ayub’s Moon won the special jury prize, and stars Austrian choreographer and performance artist Florentina Holzinger as a former professional kickboxer who becomes a personal trainer to a wealthy family in the Middle East.
The Leopard for best director went to Laurynas Bareiša’s Drowning Dry, about the aftermath of a near-tragic accident at a family weekend getaway. It also picked up one of the two gender-neutral best performance awards, for Gelminė Glemžaitė, Agnė Kaktaitė, Giedrius Kiela and Paulius Markevičius.
The other acting prize went to Kim Minhee for Hong Sangsoo’s By The Stream.
The jury was presided over by Jessica Hausner and also included Payal Kapadia, Tim Blake Nelson, Diana Elbaum and Luca Marinelli.
Filmmakers of the Present and other prizes
The jury for the Filmmakers of the Present competition awarded its Golden Leopard for best film worth CHF 35,000 ($40,400) to Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity.
The best emerging director award was presented to Denise Fernandes for Hanami, while the special jury prize Ciné+ went to Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s Listen To The Voices.
Callie Hernandez, for Courtney Stephens’ Invention, and Anna Mészöly for Bálint Szimler’s Lesson Learned won the Filmmakers of the Present best performance prizes.
The winner of the inaugural cross-section Mubi award – debut feature, with a prize worth CHF 10,000 ($11,500), went to Sylvie Ballyot’s Green Line. The documentary follows a woman who, with the help of miniature sets and animated figurines, confronts the ex-militiamen who controlled her West Beirut neighbourhood during her childhood.
Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro said the major prizes for Bliuvait, Ayub and Ballyot showed that the festival “affirmed even more strongly the centrality of women’s voices in contemporary cinema”.
Next year’s edition of Locarno Film Festival will take place from August 6-16, 2025.
No comments yet