Brazilian filmmaker Júlia Murat won the Golden Leopard for Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival yesterday for her third feature Rule 34 / Regra 34, becoming the second Brazilian director and the sixth Latin American to win the top accolade in the 75 editions of the prestigious Swiss event, one of the most important film festivals in the world.
The first Latin American director to win Locarno’s top award was Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha for his 1967 Cinema Novo pivotal film Land in Anguish (also known as Entranced Earth) / Terra em Transe. Made three years after the right-wing coup d’etat in Brazil, the film is set in the fictional country of El Dorado, in which a young intellectual attempts to chart a political path. First joining the extreme right, and then a party of the left, he ultimately finds dispiriting power dynamics in each.
A couple of years later, Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz took home the Golden Leopard for his first completed film Three Sad Tigers / Tres tristes tigres, based on the theater play by Alejandro Sieveking. Ruiz’s lively debut follows the various maneuverings and hustles of a group of small-timers striving to carve out a living in the seedy underworld of pre-Allende Santiago.
In 2005, after an awards drought of more than thirty years, Colombian-born director Rodrigo García won Locarno’s top prize foo his American drama Nine Lives starring Holly Hunter, Glenn Close, Sissy Spacek, and Kathy Baker, among others. The film follows the lives of nine women that overlap as they deal with unfaithfulness, loss, romance and parenthood, including cancer patient Camille who has a difficult time facing her life-threatening disease; prisoner Sandra, who desperately looks forward to seeing her child on visiting day; Maggie and her daughter have a heart-to-heart conversation in a graveyard; and Sonia, who is enraged when she realizes her boyfriend is seeing another woman.
Three years later, Mexican director Enrique Rivero took top honors for his 2008 debut fiction film Parque Vía, an understated drama showing the boundaries of loneliness.about a reclusive caretaker who must find a new job after 30 years when his employer sells her mansion in Mexico City.
In 2011, Argentine director Milagros Mumenthaler won the Golden Leopard for her debut feature Back to Stay / Abrir puertas y ventanas, which was also presented with the Best Actress Award and the Critics Prize. The atmospheric drama tells the story of siblings Sofía, Marina and Violeta, who following their grandma’s death, try to pick up their lives again in the house where the old woman had brought them up.
Equally remarkable, Chilean filmmaker Dominga Sotomayor made history at Locarno in 2018 with her film Too Late to Die Young / Tarde para morir joven, not only becoming the first first female filmmaker, and the first Latin American, to win the Pardo Award for Best Director in the 75 editions of the festival. This year Costa Rican filmmaker Valentina Maurel followed on Sotomayor’s footsteps, becoming the second female and Latin American filmmaker to win the Pardo Award for Best Directing for her debut feature film Tengo sueños eléctricos.
