A few days after becoming homeless I was invited to the Locarno Film Festival. I knew it only by its artsy, glamorous reputation and I wasn’t even really sure where Locarno was (the south of Switzerland, Google informed me). But when I was asked to be a member of the inaugural Letterboxd Grande Piazza jury, judging the films playing on the large outdoor screen, I, of course, said yes. I took it as a sign that I made the right choice to move back to London and throw away the last remains of the life I had been building for the previous eighteen months.
But soon enough I found myself at Gatwick airport, feeling unworthy and useless. A week before I had to call up a friend and ask them to come sit with me while I belatedly booked my flights and freak out about every detail. I hadn’t found a new job or a permanent place to live and I’d hardly watched any movies, nonetheless written about them. I wasn’t sure what I was doing going to a major film festival.
After a seamless flight and an almost relaxing journey from Milan into a landscape ever greener and more mountainous, I didn’t have more than a few seconds to appreciate Locarno – except to note the picturesque Lake Maggiore that it points towards – before running onto a bus to get to the next town over, Ascona, where I was staying.
The trains were perfectly air-conditioned, but the buses less so; I hadn’t realised just how hot it was. During the filming of The Walking Hills, a fairly middling Treasure of the Sierra Madre rip-off I saw as part of the festival’s retrospective strand exploring the history of Columbia Pictures, the desert was so hot that sweat evaporated off of the actors’ faces and had to be simulated with oil. It was never quite that hot though, so I just sweat the regular way – and did so pretty much nonstop for the next 10 days, except for when taking one of my thrice daily cold showers.
That evening I went to Pardo bar, a place critics frequent, I would assume, mostly out of habit. Certainly not for its charms. To reach the claustrophobic outside area, surrounded by high brick walls and bright yellow scaffolding, you have to walk under people playing darts. Fairy lights limply gesture towards a cosiness that’s impossible to feel on the mostly broken stools or outside of the small reach of the single working fan. There I met the rest of the jury, and everyone seemed anxious and lovely. We decided to go to a press screening, to start the festival off on the right foot.
All the press screenings were held in the bizarre Teatro Kursaal, a combination cinema, restaurant and casino. On a small screen above the entrance novelty orientalist imagery of dragons and seals and beautiful Chinese maidens flashed by, I assume to convey the unimaginable, exotic wealth that could be won therein. A jury member from Nanjing had to look away. It was a fitting setting to later watch Radu Jude’s Eight Postcards from Utopia, a collage of Romanian adverts that comically – if a little redundantly, over seventy minutes – reveal the carnal desires of their society; sex and pleasure and domination and, above all, money. It’s a reminder that everything is awful, and awful in the stupidest way possible (so it’s a Radu Jude film).
And, at the festival, there is no better example of this than the Campari Lounge, a hideous open-air stain of novelty oversized Campari bottles and gaudy red everything else. It sat behind the Piazza and at the end of a fake, cut-out street where they sold festival branded Swatches. I wasn’t quite sure who was allowed in, or why they would want to be. One night, after spending nearly fours hours in Wang Bing’s sharp and grounding Youth (Hard Times), the second in his trilogy of documentaries about Chinese garment workers, which was often painful and gruelling, especially during the endless scenes of pay negotiations, I saw a DJ playing to a full lounge and an empty dance floor. He looked dejected and miserable. I tried to snap an (admittedly sneering) photo, but, because of his total lack of other stimulation, he noticed instantly and looked hauntingly down the lens of my phone camera. I guiltily sauntered onto the late-night bus back to Ascona.
Money always hangs strangely over film festivals. Whether in omnipresent sponsorships or in the fact that all the worst films I saw had either a Swiss production company or a suspiciously touristic Alpine setting. Or in the casual conversations about travel and how many festivals you were going to this year, which weren’t always easy to have as someone who often had to opt not to eat any of the city’s overpriced and mediocre food. It’s something you can forget about briefly, for a few hours during a movie, but, when the festival consumes the entire city and your every waking moment, creates an alienating, almost surreal atmosphere.
A feeling of unreality that is perfectly captured in Virgil Vernier’s 100,000,000,000,000, in which a sex worker, who can only dream of money and comfort, finds himself amongst a family of opulent wealth and the glistening Christmas lights of Monaco. It shows a world that is not just empty but absent; the still-glowing light of an already extinguished star. It cut sharply through the noise surrounding it, which smothered so many other films.
It certainly didn’t feel appropriate to preface The Seed of the Sacred Fig, an increasingly metaphorical (to its detriment, in my opinion) drama about the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran, featuring real footage of police brutality, with a crowd camera projecting funny face filters than looked like an AI-generated Frozen Elsa onto an embarrassingly amused piazza audience. Maybe worse, when director Mohammad Rasoulof, who had to flee his home country after making this film, was brought on stage by two of the most insufferably phoney showbiz hosts I have ever seen, he was accompanied by the music from E.T.
I also felt alienated by my queerness. I was getting far more suspicious, if not outright disgusted looks from the locals than I was used to back home, which made me increasingly aware of how few trans people I saw anywhere. At an induction ceremony, unsure what else to say for myself, I joked about being here because I was one of the only trans people in London who can work to a deadline (the irony of which will not be lost on my editor); I made a joke of my difference and people laughed. Maybe a little too hard. So, unsurprisingly, Mo Matton’s Gender Reveal, where a trans throuple’s mere queer presence brings violent chaos to a gender reveal party, burst through the shorts programme. But my queerness brought no chaos. Mostly it brought quietness, or a self-conscious, somewhat clownish loudness.
I think every member of the jury felt dislocated, in their own way. If by nothing else, then the jury itself’s place at the edge of the festival. We were tangentially connected to the critic’s academy, we could go to some of their events, and to Base Camp, who we were staying with in Ascona, but we weren’t quite a part of either. And there were technical problems with our badges specifically, which were sometimes looked at by staff with incredulity and confusion. It didn’t feel great to try and explain that we were on some jury they’d obviously never heard of. But, far away from the different corners of the world and variably marginal positions we’d been pulled from, we found a space to really bond.
We jokingly called it trauma bonding, but as the festival went on, and the movies got exponentially better (I think the last five movies I saw were the best five) it felt like something deeper than that. At least to me. As beautiful as many of the movies were, they don’t compare to the sitting by the lake in the middle of the night, sharing things it would usually take months to open up about, or sprawling out on the desk in our room, because it was too hot to go up the step-ladder to the bunk beds, sharing the music we loved. That was what made it all start to make sense. Even though many of our places in the industry remained uncertain, and perhaps became more so, we had found a little community on its edges.
It was like the standout scene of Hong Sang-soo’s By The Stream, where a group of university students, after finishing a short stage performance, each share the kind of person they want to become, all of a sudden bearing their dreams and their scars. Like when you’re away at a film festival, far from any other reality, working on this play made space for a unique kind of intimacy, even if only in this brief moment, that would soon go away, with people they may never see again. All of us who were at that screening wept together.
On the day we chose Gaucho Gaucho – an elegiac documentary about another, perhaps more meaningfully marginal community, a small group of Gauchos in Argentina, fighting for their fading way of life – as the winner of our award (a choice I think we were all pretty happy with) Gena Rowlands died, and the moments of still-growing connection started to be tinged with sadness. I wondered when we’d see each other again.
Afterwards, people start to slip away, into their exhaustion or into the writing they needed to finish. But, strangely, I found myself clinging on. I went to the beach with the critic’s academy, making new connections as if they had any space to grow, and I tried to catch some of the hyped films I’d missed. The festival had been so all-consuming (and so for all intents and purposes without end), but now it had clear limits, it felt suddenly finite and precious. Maybe it was because I didn’t know when I would be able to afford something like this again, or maybe it was because I had said goodbye to so many things and so many people in these last few months and I wasn’t ready to do it again.
But after a tearful two-and-a-half-hour train ride to Milan airport, I had to say goodbye to the final jury member, the one I’d gotten closest to. I tried to express myself, I tried to say something, but I just babbled. Then I got on the plane back to London. As it took off I started to cry again, as I always do seeing the world shrink so small below me. I looked down, to try and see Locarno one more time. But of course, I couldn’t. The airport was miles away. It was already long gone.
A film festival is a dreamlike palace and I was starting to wake up. Its contours – the frustration, the connections, the loneliness, the beauty – were starting to blur into a painful longing, into only a warm memory of something lost. I guess writing this is a way to try and keep it sharp, to remember the bad parts as much as the good, to try and grab ahold of some elusive thing. But in that moment, I didn’t want to look anymore. Through my tears, I paid £4.99 for in-flight Wi-Fi and logged onto Indeed. I tried to go back to my normal life.
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