Who will win the Leopard at Locarno? [2026 edition]

I should root for Brave New Love, as apparently it's a Danish production, but Maria Bäck is Swedish, so... High hopes for Le Bao. His 'Taste' is on MUBI, very interesting.

Oooh!

Taste has been on my Mubi watchlist for some time... during a period of seriously intermittent membership. Will endeavour to see it now that I'm back.

At a glance, I may only have encountered Hong Sang-soo and Florin Șerban from the contenders!? I recall the latter's If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle amongst lower-tier Romanian new wave-associated fodder back in the day.

Ah, Giovanni Tortorici was the Diciannove chap, a couple of years ago. That was okay IMHO, in that meandering Italian way. Though not mind-blowing.

Found myself watching Isabelle Stever's Grand Jeté on, I think, Kanopy. The cool, muted approach to the edgy subject matter possibly renders less memorable, a few days on, than I might have expected!

And I finally watched Lê Bảo's Taste, which was very striking indeed. Not at all surprised to find pretty much all writing on it making comparisons to Pedro Costa.

Denis Côté used to be a regular at Berlin, before that festival self-destructed. He is up and down, but worth looking into.

Gurvinder Singh got a lot of hype for Alms in the Name of a Blind Horse in 2011. I think I saw his Chauthi Koot on Netflix, it was pretty good. New one is his first since finishing a Punjab trilogy. I think focus has turned towards Tamil cinema over the past decade, but I don't really know.

The frontrunners might genuinely be Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña, who make stop motion films about Chilean History. The Wolf House got a lot of attention (was on MUBI, might still be?), and I could definitely see them as this year's big breakthrough.

Intriguing. I'm completely ignorant about León/Cociña...

I see Blind Horse is just sitting there on Youtube, oddly enough.

I'm been less mobile this week which has been a handy excuse to consume films at an almost comical rate lol.

I misspoke slightly: realised that I'd seen León/Cociña's short Los Huesos somewhere in recent years. And I found and watched The Wolf House just now. (It helps that it's a very compact feature.) Pretty groovy, 'strue!

At the risk of basically live-tweeting everything ever, I found a couple of Côté shorts to watch over breakfast earlier. He seemed extremely up my proverbial alley and I was just about to say "but damn, he barely seems to be distributed at all beyond festivals" before spying a goodly number of (seemingly) full works on his Vimeo channel, at least: https://vimeo.com/deniscotecinema

Anyway, thanks for vouching for him FB!

Oh, cool! It's not his most representative work, but his covid correctly distanced film, Social Hygiene, is quite something. I also mostly like the documentaries I've seen.