"Muriel Box's Simon and Laura, 1955, and Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf, 2025, exemplify the temporal and thematic breadth of the Swiss Italian festival's programming, which routinely mines the personal and political dimensions of contemporary life. A highlight of the festival's postwar British cinema retrospective, Box's Technicolor comedy, about an unhappy couple who sign up to play "themselves" on a television show, holds up today as both a witty spoof of marriage traditions and a prescient satire of the reality TV craze."
"Meanwhile, Koberidze's third feature-and the standout of the International Competition-follows a middle-aged man (played by the director's real-life father) as he traces his missing daughter's footsteps across the abandoned soccer fields of rural Georgia. Depicting his protagonist's journey through a Monet-esque pixelated haze, Koberidze abstracts the docufictional form through beautifully bleary images that inspire a sense of melancholic mystery and awe for life's small wonders."
Two standout films at the Seventy-Eighth Locarno Film Festival were made seven decades apart and exemplify temporal and thematic breadth. Muriel Box's Simon and Laura (1955), shot in VistaVision and Technicolor, follows an unhappy couple who sign up to play 'themselves' on a television show, a witty spoof of marriage traditions and a prescient satire of reality television. Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf (2025), shot on a late-2000s Sony Ericsson cell phone, follows a middle-aged man tracing his missing daughter's footsteps across abandoned soccer fields in rural Georgia, rendered in a Monet-esque pixelated haze that abstracts docufiction into melancholic mystery. Kamal Aljafari's With Hasan in Gaza revisits MiniDV footage from 2001, filmed during the Second Intifada, with images that reveal how little has changed.
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