Festival Scope and Amayzing Movies team up to bring the best of Locarno Film Festival in real time

August 04, 2017

Scary Mother

Georgia, Estonia, 2017, 107 min

Starring: Nata Murvanidze, Ramaz Ioseliani, Dimitri Tatishvili, Avtandil Makharadze

Production: Artizm, Gemini, Allfilm

A 50-year-old housewife, Manana, struggles with a dilemma: she has to choose between her family life and a love for writing she has repressed for years. When she finally decides to follow her passion, she is ready to sacrifice everything for it, mentally and physically.

August 05, 2017

Damned Summer

Portugal, 2017, 128 min

Starring: Pedro Marujo, Ana Valentim, Lia Carvalho, Daniel Viana

Production: Optec, Videolotion / International Sales: Slingshot Films

Idling afternoons, drugs, heartbreaks, psychedelic moods immersed in music. An adrenaline rush. Lisbon as the backdrop for a drifting youth.

August 06, 2017

Severina

Brazil, Uruguay, 2017, 103 min

Starring: Javier Drolas, Carla Quevedo, Alejandro Awada

Production: RT Features

A melancholic, aspiring writer and bookseller is shaken by the appearances and disappearances of his newfound muse who steals books from his bookstore. When he discovers that she also steals from other bookstores, he is consumed with jealousy and starts living in a kind of love delirium, on the border between fiction and reality. The closer he gets to her, the more indescribable she becomes and he begins to wonder why she steals, what are her values and who is the older man she lives with. In the end, what is real and what isn’t? And will he find a place in her life as he moves away from his own?

August 08, 2017

Meteors

Netherlands, Turkey, 2017, 84 min

Starring: Ebru Ojen

Production: 29P Films / International Sales: Heretic Outreach

They come at night and everybody steps out. They light torches and remember those who have walked these streets before them. In the coming hours, the city wil be on lockdown: an eclipse appears and meteors start to fall.

August 09, 2017

Easy

Ukraine, Italy, 2017, 91 min

Starring: Nicola Nocella, Ostap Stupka, Orest Garda, Libero De Rienzo, Barbara Bouchet

Production: Fresh Production, Bartlebyfilm, Pilgrim / International Sales: Premium Films

Easy, short for Isidoro, an ex pilot, is given a new job far from the racing circuits: taking a coffin, with the body of an Ukrainian bricklayer, from Italy to a small mountain village in Ukraine.  But he quickly gets lost after the border. His lifetime adventure can begin.

August 09, 2017

Le Fort des Fous

France, Qatar, Greece, Germany, Algeria, 2017, 140 min

Production: Centrale Electrique, Xenia Film

Using archives from the early scientific expeditions and taming campaigns led by the French colonizers in North Africa, Le Fort de fous follows a community of young nomads and wanderers as they form an imagined utopian society in response to imperialistic rule. Reenactments, improvisations, and interviews are conducted with the inhabitants of Algiers, Kythira Island and the Prosfygika community in Athens to describe an alternative temporality and autonomous space, reflecting on the transmission and re-appropriation of history and reviving memories as strategies of resistance.

August 09, 2017

Those Who Are Fine

Switzerland, 2017, 71 min

Starring: Sarah Stauffer, Nikolai Bosshardt, Fidel Morf, Belgouidoum Chihanez, Toni Majdaladi, Mohamed Aghrabi

Production: Seeland Filmproduktion GmbH, Amon Films / International Sales: Seeland Filmproduktion GmbH

Alice works in a call center in the outskirts of Zurich, selling internet subscriptions and insurance deals to strangers on the other end of the line. After work she walks through the city, which seems to function without any friction. Inspired by her job, she calls lonely grandmothers and pretends to be their granddaughter in urgent need of money. With this trick, she quickly makes a fortune.

August 11, 2017

Sweating the Small Stuff

Japan, 2017, 114 min

Starring: Ninomiya Ryutaro, Ninomiya Tetsuo, Matsumoto Daiki, Yajima Yasumi, Kimura Tomoki, Imaoka Shinji, Hirose Yuki, Miyoshi Yuki

Production: Kurinke / International Sales: Kurinke

Ryutaro Ninomiya, 27 years old, lives a fairly simple life. He works at an auto-repair shop, reads books and drinks a few beers. One day, he receives a phone call from Yusuke, his childhood friend whose mother, Ryuko, is dying from Hepatitis C. Despite knowing for a while that Ryuko was sick, Ryutaro hasn’t visited her, but today he decides to go.

August 11, 2017

Farewell

Austria, 2017, 80 min

Starring: Sven Horst

Production: Trotzdemfilm, Little Magnet Films, Nanookfilm

The film is based on the eponymous 1960 novel by author Peter Weiss. In this autobiographical text, the author describes the years of his childhood and youth in Germany in the 20s and 30s as well as the flight of his half-Jewish family from persecution by the Nazis. This odyssey also portrays the young first-person narrator’s struggle for his artistic existence, as he was striving to establish himself as a painter and writer. In a free, sensual essay between fiction and document, realistic description and stylised invention, the film attempts to kindle today’s flame based on the past’s, and to create a new and vibrant third work from it.