Locarno, Switzerland, July 8, 2025 (Lusa) - The film “As Estações” (The Seasons) by French director Maureen Fazendeiro will make its world premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland, where it will compete in the main section, the organisation announced on Tuesday.
The Lisbon-based director’s first feature-length documentary, “As Estações,” was filmed entirely in Alentejo, according to information from the production company O Som e a Fúria.
At the press conference to present this year’s festival programme, which will take place in the Swiss city between 6 and 16 August, the event’s director, Giona Nazzaro, described “As Estações” as “a poetic look at the history of Portugal”.
“Combining testimonies from rural workers and field notes from a couple of archaeologists, amateur archive footage and scientific drawings, legends, poems and songs, ‘As Estações’ is a journey through the real and invented history of a region of Portugal, the Alentejo, and the people who lived there,” reads the synopsis provided by the production company.
The film will be screened in the international competition at Locarno alongside works such as ‘Dracula’ by Radu Jude, ‘Mektoub, My Love: Canto Due’ by Abdellatif Kechiche, and ‘With Hasan in Gaza’ by Kamal Aljafari, among others.
‘As Estações’ is also competing for the Green Leopard, an award for works that have the ecosystem in mind.
The documentary “Nova ’78” by Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias will screen out of competition, presenting the convention that gives the film its title, which took place in 1978 in New York and brought together a whole generation of American artists and intellectualsfor “three days and nights of readings, discussions, film screenings and various types of performances that sought to interact with some of the implications of William S. Burroughs’ writing”, as The New York Times wrote at the time.
According to information available on the website of Rodrigo Areias’ production company, Bando à Parte, “Restorers recovered and restored Howard Brookner’s footage of the ‘New York Convention’ between 2012 and 2024. This film gives new life to all the images recorded in 1978”, emphasising that “most of these recordings remain unseen until now”.
The film includes images of figures such as Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson and Frank Zappa, among many others.
As part of the Open Doors Screenings programme, which takes place in collaboration with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the films “Nome” by Sana Na N’Hada (produced by Guinea-Bissau, France, Portugal and Angola) and “Omi Nobu” by Carlos Yuri Ceuninck (Cabo Verde, Belgium, Germany and Sudan).
This year’s Locarno Festival will award career prizes to actors Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu, while director Alexander Payne will receive the Honorary Leopard.
TDI/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
