August 2006: Summertime – Locarno – Locarno Film Festival

This year twenty films, and fifteen different countries: the competition in 2006 stands out as an arena for exciting discoveries. Established filmmakers such as the Catalonian Marc Recha («Dies d’Agost»), Iain Dilthey from Germany («Genfangene»), Dito Tsintsadze from Georgia(«Der Mann von der Botschaft») and the Italian Roberta Torre («Mare Nero») refine upon their poetic sensibilities. The younger Cuban Jorge Luis Sanchez, and Sarde Enrico Pau boldly employ melodramatic devices to recount singular destinies, linked in the one case to the Cuban dereliction, in the other to the Italian crisis. And even younger directors such as Hugo Vieira da Silva from Portugal, and Laurent Achard from France, take us into crisis situations that are both lucid and tough-minded.